More information here: http://mlasubconference.org/

The second year of the Subconference of the MLA will center on struggle as a non-negotiable and constitutive action for responding to ours and others’ increasing contingency. When we say non-negotiable, we mean that the following tactics are no longer optional: Direct and collective action, critical research on the financial and labor structures of higher education, union organizing, collectivizing wages and resources, making knowledge and information networks available by whatever means possible, and rejecting gains for some workers that would mean losses for others. These tactics can no longer be considered nostalgically as actions that belong to the past nor idealistically as something to do in the future. They are necessary tactics we need now as we grapple with higher education as a site of economic accumulation and subjective disciplining. Last year we asked, “Who are the subjects of these vulnerable times?” This year we ask which sites, both past and present, demonstrate that only an uncompromising rejection of austerity and precarity can be successful? In addition, we challenge ourselves to consider how such a politics of non-negotiability needs to influence and reconfigure our reading, visual, interpretive, and pedagogical practices as laborers in higher education.