Teaching, Organizing and Surviving: Labor Justice as Pedagogical Imperative in Precarious Times

As a part-time lecturer working across multiple institutions, I have spent the past decade navigating and organizing within the increasingly hostile terrain of higher education. This presentation offers reflections from inside the struggle — grounded in lived experience as a queer, non-binary Latinx first-generation American union activist and educator who has helped lead collective bargaining efforts, including strikes, at both public and private colleges. I will explore how contingent labor structures reflect broader patterns of institutional inequity and commodification and how they shape not only our material conditions but also our pedagogical possibilities.

In a time of political backlash against DEIJ, attacks on academic freedom and the collapse of public funding, faculty are stretched thin, undervalued and increasingly isolated. We must ask: Who is allowed to teach, under what conditions and to what end? How do we foster philosophical and creative growth when students and educators alike are treated as data points or revenue streams?

This talk centers the urgency of labor justice as a pedagogical concern. Through institutional critique and grounded experience, I advocate for education as a collective practice — one rooted in care, solidarity and shared power. We cannot talk about curriculum without talking about labor. We cannot build liberatory classrooms without supporting the people who hold them. Resisting austerity and exploitation is not separate from our teaching — it is essential to it.