MLA paper presentation: "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Contingent Academic"

Well, that was a nail-biter! 

So, yeah, sure .... I may have known I was going present at MLA today for nine months, but that didn't stop me from only starting my conference paper yesterday afternoon. Luckily, I knew exactly what I wanted to say. The subject is an easy one for me: serving in departmental leadership despite precarious employment.

And like most of my conference papers nowadays, it is a (self-professed) hilarious one. A chuckle-riot of a story about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer somehow doesn't interfere with me carefully laying out many issues faced by a contingent academic serving in a leadership role. I've uploaded it to academic.edu, and although I now wish that I'd called it "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Contingent Academic," it's officially called, "Above and Beyond: Joining Departmental Leadership while Contingent."

Also, the weird thing about doing a hilarious presentation on Zoom is that there's no real-time audience feedback -- everyone's muted. So it's hard to tell whether I'm bombing or not.

However, at the end of the session, one person kindly let me know how much they enjoyed it -- and that made my day.


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