ABSTRACT
The contractualisation of faculty has been a trend in the last couple of decades across the globe, and India has not been immune to this trend either. Though studies have captured the demographic division and thereby been able to assess the inclusivity or the lack of it in terms of the permanent staff, no studies are available on the contractual faculties in the Indian context. In this chapter, we examine the marginalisation of contingent faculty in higher education across the country; we dwell especially on the identity markers such as gender, social class, caste, ethnicity, sexual identity and age that intersect with positionality of a contingent faculty. We frame our argument on the concept of queer time that functions within heteronormative ideas of temporality, thus making contingent positions inherently precarious, as they become more pronounced when they intersect with existing vulnerabilities of gender, caste and sexual identities. By conducting open-ended interviews, we provide opportunity and voice to contingent faculty, inviting them to share their experiences as well as allowing us to reimagine more egalitarian and enabling higher education spaces.
