Produced through market relations of neoliberal managerialism, teacher subjectivities are becoming progressively commodified. With the increasing casualisation of the teaching workforce, the wellbeing and status of casual relief teachers (CRT) can be seen as an area of concern, at risk of "flexploitation" (Bourdieu 1998, p. 85). More than just a convenient labour pool, CRTs operate on the margins of school communities, a space fraught with a range of issues. In many instances CRTs experience less job satisfaction, less rapport with students and colleagues and less access to school information, professional development, resources and teaching materials. This article draws on a positioning theory to frame the discursive production of casual relief teacher (CRT) selves within the neoliberal milieu. It offers an analysis of collective biographies that explore narrative formations of casual teaching. Schooling discourse is replete with metaphorical language that frame teacher positioning and a range of existing metaphors in CRT literature highlight their vulnerability in particular. Rather than offering an analysis that addresses casual teacher performance as a problem to be solved, this article proposes that the relationship between 'structural marginalisation and the 'othering' that CRTs can experience is associated with the politics of market-related performativity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.