As a prevailing factor in all socio-economical systems, precarious labour involves concentrating the risks and uncertainties of the corresponding sector on a group of people understood as peripheral. In artistic education, in the university context, this model is often expressed in tiered hierarchy between professors with job stability and those called “sessionals” or “non-regulars”. The model is imperfect, since the majority of teachers in artistic fields—actors, musicians, designers, artists, as well as curators and programmers—have a creative vocation that is not compatible with full-time teaching. Even so, part-time professors in higher artistic education, along with researchers, lab technicians, workers on grants and others end up guaranteeing the overall system’s balance, understood cynically. The more egalitarian entry of women into the academic world coincides directly with this tendency. Younger teachers, immigrants and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds have been equally disfavoured.

University centres insist on projecting values of excellence and academic prestige, which are essential in a competitive context amidst declining demographics. Yet at the same time, sessional instructors and other precarious workers are asked to have a degree of institutional commitment that does not correspond to their working conditions. Contradictions of the “cognitariat”.

With this project, we seek to reflect on the consequences of the model—for affected individuals, for creation and creative research, for university centres, as well as for pedagogy and students. The dream of a shared community of knowledge and the value of mentorship have been weakened by monetisation, marketing and the bureaucratic control of artistic education.

The subject of precarious labour in artistic education has been analysed in theoretical writings, as well as in fiction and artistic projects, features this proposal strives to reflect. An exemplary case is an art project in book format by Terra Poirier, which analyses the subject of her own mentors, sessional instructors at the university where she studied for her degree in photography (Non-Regular: Precarious academic labour at Emily Carr University Art + Design, 2018).