Vani kannan-syracuse university 1 Joe schicke-tulsa community college sue doe-colorado state university keyWords organic theater, academic labor, performative activism I In Adrianna Kezar's edited collection Embracing Non-Tenure Track Faculty: Changing Campuses for the New Faculty Majority she cites several campuses as case studies of what she posits as three fundamental phases of adjunct advocacy and integration: mobilization (phase one), implementation (phase two) and institutionalization (phase three). Kezar suggests that movement from phase one to phase three is accomplished through a range of mechanisms including governance, executive caveat, outside expert or consultant recommendation, unionization, and activism. Our experience suggests that this model is useful for understanding the status of equity efforts, but that grassroots perturbation is necessary to move through each of these stages. In this article, we put Kezar's model into conversation with a call from Maria Maisto, President and Executive Director of the New Faculty Majority (NFM), for greater utilization of the arts in the academic labor movement: "Advocacy for adjuncts and their students needs to be carried out using all of the communicative tools we have: the full range of media, rhetorics, and art forms that can convey the humanity at the core of the issue. " Specifically, we share our experience enacting academic labor activism through organic theater, a performative organizing tactic that can be used to build community horizontally within rehearsal and performance spaces while productively linking academic labor equity with other local and regional organizing efforts. Our experience suggests that organic theater can be used during any of Kezar's stages to complement and excite traditional approaches such as surveying faculty, developing professional association position/policy statements, and increasing non tenure-track faculty participation in shared governance. We believe that performative interventions like organic theater complement Kezar's Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, which provides tools by which institutions can undertake systematic analysis and improvement of labor policies, and build more inclusive environments within the academy. With Maisto, we believe that creativity and artistry can stand alongside statistics, data, and other empirical approaches, make both theoretical and tactical performing Horizontal activism
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