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knowledge at unprecedented rates.3 Meanwhile, university faculty and staff, especially graduate students and adjuncts, are sorely undercompensated and underappreciated for the time and physical, intellectual, and emotional labor that goes into teaching, service, and research (which is not to say that those forms of labor are wholly separable). Cvetkovich (2012), offers an exemplar for scholarly agendas concerned with unveiling and problematizing the affective labor of academic work, especially in the humanities and social science disciplines that happen to encompass media studies. In addition to being part-memoir, the book poses strong criticism and begins to develop theory about, among other topics, the affective and everyday realities of work in higher education—and its infuriatingly tedious and anxiety-producing hazards. Cvetkovich (2012), a scholar of feminist and queer theory, affect and Public Feelings,4 wrote an effective memoir/journal/“performative writing” project about her foray into academia and coinciding bouts of depression. Naming her target audience in the introduction of her book, Cvetkovich (2012) also revealed the affective baggage tied to “junior scholarship”: “graduate students and untenured and adjunct faculty, especially those in the humanities, whose relation to these conditions is often a very palpable sense of fear, anxiety, and, very frequently, diagnoses of depression” (18). Cvetkovich’s (2012) own story about her experiences in academe is a strong testament to the affective turmoil academic labor can bestow, especially for untenured faculty and staff, including graduate students. For example, Cvetkovich (2012) wrote that academics are consistently “squeezed on the one hand by an intensely competitive job market and meritocratic promotion and reward system and driven on the other by a commitment to social justice that often leaves us feeling like we’re never doing enough” (19). She continued: The forms of productivity demanded by the academic sphere of the professional managerial class can tell us something more general about corporate cultures that demand deliverables and measurable outcomes and that say you are only as good as what you produce. (In this context it can be especially hard to justify creative or individualized intellectual work, and teaching or administration may feel more concrete than pursuing creative thought.) (Cvetkovich 2012, 19)
