Composition, like other disciplines, has seen an explosion in the number of faculty teaching on a contingent basis. Contingent faculty—also known as adjunct faculty— represents an understudied group working with no benefits or job security: their employment is contingent upon enrollment, departmental budgets, and a host of other factors.

As a contingent instructor of composition both “on-ground” and online, I am interested in bringing awareness to the material reality of teaching writing contingently. I aim to share the stories of contingent faculty in their own words, while advocating for the importance and validity of anecdotal evidence and personal stories in composition scholarship about contingency. I also explore research methodologies that privilege the personal, such as autoethnographic and archival research, and apply archival research methodology to analyze a cataclysmic Twitter conversation about contingent faculty that serves as both an example of hashtag activisim and a public forum where individuals can share their stories of contingency.

Contingent faculty’s experiences are critical to the future of composition scholarship: we cannot ethically move forward with improving, innovating, or assessing writing instruction in a meaningful way until we examine the material conditions under which much of that instruction occurs. Rhetoric and composition scholarship has a moral obligation to examine the working conditions of contingent writing instructors; to make space for their stories within the scholarship; to consider how their experiences impact students, departments, programs, and our profession; and to advocate for their rights and fair treatment.