Regardless of the institutional context, the success of recruitment initiatives depends on resources. Funding and collegial support go a long way in facilitating effective student recruitment. Here, innovative ideas meet eager co-conspirators, which can be a source of joy for the scholar practitioner and an opportunity for building a strong community. But sometimes even the most financially supported recruitment initiatives rest on the exploitation of individual faculty. The time and effort recruitment requires might surpass the allotted or available time for program “service.” Even though recruitment is vital for program strength, it is not always rewarded or recognized as vital labor practice in higher education. All of this is compounded for scholars in contingent positions, whose very job safety often feels tethered to recruitment success. The “cost” of recruitment can thus feel like a structural failure even in the face of successful recruitment initiatives.

This session brings scholar-practitioners in the language and culture studies together to reflect on these and other ideas relating to recruitment cultures and our discourses about them. It aims to feature innovative recruitment strategies, scholar-practitioner reflection about the pleasures and pitfalls in recruitment, and work toward a critical engagement with recruitment as a vital practice in language and culture studies.

The first presentation pertains to recruitment work. Neoliberal budgetary models and discourses of crisis and urgency have buttressed support for “results”-oriented recruitment initiatives, which are understood primarily as countable upticks in enrollment numbers and thus discursively designed as quantitative evidence of an initiative’s (or individual’s) success (or failure). McGregor argues that this conception does not foreground recruitment as a complex and situated collaborative endeavor that involves, well, people. In the presentation, she highlights realities that already run counter to institutional discourses about recruitment: iterative trust-building work that goes on between faculty and students, the existence of language play in recruitment, and finally, the often hidden yet precarious realities of many students and faculty.

The second presentation pertains to DEI work. Klueppel will examine the importance of drawing on and supporting campus DEI initiatives. Language programs often feel on the sidelines of such initiatives, partially self-identified as “natural” venues for diversity given the subject matter, but there is lots of work to be done to articulate how language programs connect to the lived experience of historically marginalized students. Klueppel, to this end, reflects on the extensive labor of graduate student instructors in implementing DEI-aligned recruitment events for a small language program. In this presentation, he reflects on labor inequities, underfunding or funding out of reach for graduate students instructors, and the necessarily and yet joyful work of shaping solidarities across lines of difference as a means to dream up better futures for language and culture studies in North America.

The third speaker reflects on recruitment for less commonly taught languages (LCTLs). The pressures of student recruitment are acutely felt by instructors and program directors of so-called Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs), which are commonly taught by contingent faculty and which are routinely underfunded. Drawing on his role as director of a Yiddish Program, Johnson will reflect on how smallness of programs itself helps them attract students. He will also provide insights about recent shifts at OSU to help LCTL programs work together and step away from the idea that they are competing for students.

The fourth presentation pertains to the difficult tension faced by a contingent faculty, who is charged with increasing enrollments in their small language program in order to secure their job for the future. Here, Wuensch reflects on two points. 1. extensive labor involved in communicating with colleagues and constantly advocating for funding allocation to support initiatives. 2. she describes successful initiatives at Skidmore to recruit students to the program. The aim will be to raise awareness of the labor conditions for this work and outline the joyful interactions among students that this work brings about.

Format: four 10 minute presentations, the rest is allotted for discussion with audience and an interest in developing a recruitment collective to help collect and share strategies.