Long Road to the Dream Job in Academia: A Conversation with Liz W. Faber

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

• Dr. Liz Faber’s long road from completed PhD to dream job
• Why academia said she was a failure
• The financial reasons she worked two academic jobs at once
• The importance of speaking out about pay-scale and departmental inequities
• Putting kindness in the classroom
• Why you have to define your own success

Our guest is: Dr. Liz W Faber, an Assistant Professor of English & Communication at Dean College. Her teaching and research interests include multimodal communication, science communication, representations of AI in science fiction, computer history, and gender/sexuality studies. She is the author of The Computer's Voice: From Star Trek to Siri (U. Minnesota Press, 2020) and the guest editor for the Popular Culture Studies Journal special issue on robots and labor. She can be found on Twitter (@lizwfab) or at her website (lizwfaber.com).

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-producer of the Academic Life podcasts.

Listeners to this episode might be interested in:

• "Faculty Talk about Teaching at a Community College" by Dianne Finley and Sherry Kinslow
• Academic Ableism by Jay Dolmage (U Michigan Press, 2017)
• More than Machines? by Laura Voss (Columbia U Press, 2021)
• Carleigh Brower’s work
• The Computer's Voice: From Star Trek to Siri by Liz Faber (U. Minnesota Press, 2020) 
• Articles on robots and labor, ed by Dr. Liz Faber Popular Culture Studies Journal https://mpcaaca.org/the-
• NEA article on the need for change 
• Inside Higher Ed examines contingent faculty wages 
• The Daily Beast finds making coffee pays more than being an adjunct

You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts. Wish we’d bring on a particular expert? DM on Twitter @AcademicLifeNBN.

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