Proceedings Seventh Biennial Conference of the Center for Working-Class Studies New Working-Class Studies: Past, Present, and Future May 18 –21, 2005 Youngstown State University Youngstown, Ohio Forward Welcome to the Seventh Biennial Conference of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. This year, the Center proudly marks its 10th anniversary and hosting the seventh biennial conference, Working-Class Studies: Past, Present, and Future. The CWCS affiliates and Advisory Board wish to thank the 200 scholars, workers, students, and activists for their participation in the conference and for their support of the Center over the past decade. This year’s conference includes individuals from 32 states and five countries representing a rich diversity of individuals, academic disciplines, and theoretical and practical approaches to the development of New Working-Class Studies. The conference includes presentations, papers, roundtables, poetry readings, performance art, and an art exhibit. This year’s conference features keynote presentations by two prominent but very different scholar-activists, Mike Rose and Ruy Teixeira. Rose’s books on working-class education have helped to shape models of working-class pedagogy, especially for teachers of reading and writing. His most recent book invites us to consider the intellectual and cognitive elements of various forms of manual labor, work that is often denigrated as “unskilled.” Teixeira’s research maps voting patterns, beliefs, and values, and his 2000 book (written with Joel Rogers) argued for the continuing political significance of working-class voters. He is a Joint Fellow at the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation. In addition, we have invited a panel of editors from academic and small press publishers to comment on the state and future of publishing in Working-Class Studies, and we will close the conference with a plenary discussion on the future of the field. The conference will also include the first business meeting of the new Working-Class Studies Association. Through these presentations and plenaries, together with the exciting and diverse sessions, readings, and performances, we will examine the history, current status, and future possibilities of this emerging new field. We would like to recognize the organizations and individuals who helped make this conference possible. Once again, the CWCS conference is sponsored in part by the Ford Foundation. We appreciate the support and encouragement of program officers Gertrude Fraser, Margaret Wilkerson, and the Director of the Education, Knowledge, and Religion, Janice Petrovich. A special thanks to the other centers in Working-Class Studies: the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies (University of Illinois, Chicago), the Institute for the Study of Working Class Life (SUNY at Stony Brook), Minnesota Center for Working-Class Studies (University of Minnesota), the Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives Program (Michigan State University), the Race, Class and Gender Project (Southern University, New Orleans), the Center for African-American Women and Labor (University of Maryland), and the newest center, the Working Lives Research Institute (London Metropolitan University, UK). From the YSU community, we would like to thank President David Sweet, former Provost Tony Atwater, Acting Provost Bege Bowers, and especially Dean Robert Bolla of the College of Arts and Sciences and Dean Betty Jo Licata of the Williamson College of Business Administration for their continued support of the CWCS. We would also like to thank Exhibition Designer Robyn Maas and Nancy Haraburda, Site Manager for the Youngstown Historical Center for Industry and Labor, for their support and efforts in setting up the exhibit and events at the “steel museum.” Once again, CWCS affiliate Bryn Zellers has designed a beautiful conference poster for all those attending the conference. Mary Margaret Hovanes and the Kilcawley Center staff, Bill Sperlazza and his staff at Housing Services, Joe Scarnecchia and his Support Services staff, and Chief John Gocala and the campus police facilitated conference arrangements. Finally, and most importantly, the Center has a gifted administrative assistant in Patty LaPresta. Her humor, kindness, and patience kept everyone organized and on-task as we prepared for conference. We are indebted to her in so many ways. John Russo and Sherry Linkon Co-Directors, CWCS Introduction and Contents These proceedings represent many but not all of the presentations given at this year’s conference. Some presenters did not submit abstracts or they were not received in time for inclusion. The abstracts are arranged in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Contents: Keynote Speakers/Plenaries . . . . pg 4 Conference Program . . . . . . . . . . pgs 5 - 18 Abstracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pgs 19 – 65 Keynote Speakers Mike Rose Mike Rose has taught for over 35 years at all levels of the American educational system. He is on the faculty of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, Division of Social Research Methodology. He has written a number of books and articles on language, literacy, schooling, and work including Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Underprepared, Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, and The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker. Ruy Teixeira Ruy Teixeira is a Senior Fellow at both the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation. He is the author of five books including The Emerging Democratic Majority, written with John Judis and published in 2002, and America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, written with Joel Rogers and published in 2000. He is also the author of hundreds of articles, both scholarly and popular, a weekly online column, Public Opinion Watch and a daily weblog or “blog”, Donkey Rising. Plenaries Editors Plenary - The editors’ plenary includes editors from both large and small presses. Fran Benson is the editor at Cornell University Press who is responsible for a new series of publications in new working-class studies. John Crawford is the publisher at West End Press which publishes socially conscious literature, concentrating on multiculturalism, working-class studies and women's literature. LeAnn Fields is the Senior Executive Editor at The University of Michigan Press and is responsible for new publication series on class and culture. Larry Smith is the editor at Bottom Dog Press that publishes poetry, anthologies and fiction exploring working lives. Working-Class Futures Plenary will bring together reflections on the development of New Working-Class Studies by experienced and emerging scholars, including Tim Strangleman (Working Lives Research Institute/London Metropolitan University), Dorian Warren (University of Chicago), Michele Fazio (SUNY/Stony Brook), and Sherry Linkon (Youngstown State University, Co-Director/CWCS) who will then lead an open discussion by the conferees. Conference Schedule May 18, Wednesday 4:00 – 7:30 p.m. CONFERENCE REGISTRATION 7:30 – 9:30 p. m. KEYNOTE PRESENTATION “The Mind at Work” Mike Rose, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, Division of Social Research Methodology May 19, Thursday 9:00 - 10:15 a.m. Century Representations of Class in the UK “Animals as 18th Century Text: Socioeconomic Class Issues as Contextualized in Goldsmith’s Writing and Gainsborough’s Painting” Lew Caccia, Kent State University “Labour Market Change in Deindustrialized Areas: A Comparison of the UK and the US” Paul Sissons, University College/London “The Making of an Icon: Weaver-Florists and the Representation of English Working-Class Docility and Independence” Robin Veder, Penn State/Harrisburg Chair: David Simonelli, Youngstown State University The Anthropology of Class: Inequality, Hierarchy, and the other Politics of Resistance “The Deproletarization of Detroit” Jean Burton, Wayne State University “Good Girls Don’t but I Do: Class, Race, Gender, Education, Work, and Femininity” Sherry Lynn Holland, Wayne State University/Detroit “Car Theft, Transition and Transgression in Bulgaria” Selmin Kara, Wayne State University Paul Van Reesch Chair: Sherry Lynn Holland, Wayne State University/Detroit Neighborhood Organizing (Community University Partnerships) “Engaging Conversations: The Ontario, California, Grassroots Thinktank” Marie Sandy, Claremont Graduate University Chair: Susan Frederick-Gray, First Unitarian Church of Youngstown Middle-Class Allies in Working-Class Studies Sherry Linkon, Youngstown State University (Co-Director/CWCS) Betsy Leondar-Wright, United for a Fair Economy Chair: Jack Metzgar, Roosevelt University Theories of Class “From Industrial to Post-Industrial Production: A Challenge for Working-Class Literature” Martin Kley, UT Austin “Imagining the End of Capital as We Know It: Debating the Objective of Working-Class Studies through Readings of Cheri Register’s Packinghouse Daughter and Maureen Brady’s Folly” Tim Libretti, Northeastern Illinois University “Workers Writing: The Working-Class Sensibility and a Marxist Theory of Literature” Antoine J. Polgar, Medaille College Chair: Nick Tingle, University of California/Santa Barbara Teaching Working-Class Students “Fat Cats and Underdogs: Work, Class, and the American Dream – A Learning Community” Margaret Bayless, Lane Community College “Working-Class Pedagogy and the Politics of Power in First-Year College Writing” Angela Bilia, The University of Akron “Retelling Class at a Public Ivy and a Regional Campus: A Case Study in Basic Writing” John Paul Tassoni, Miami University/Middletown Chair: William DeGenaro, Miami University--Hamilton Gendered Class and Laboring Bodies: A Reading “Middle-Class Drag: Performing Gender Across Classes” Renny Christopher, California State University/Channel Islands (CWCS International Advisory Committee Member) “Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work” Janet Zandy, Rochester Institute of Technology (CWCS International Advisory Committee Member) Chair: Barb Jensen, Metropolitan State University 10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. KEYNOTE PRESENTATION “Whither the White Working Class” Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow at both the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation 1:30 - 3:00 p.m. Literacy for Working-Class Teachers and Students: A Dialogue with Patrick Finn Patrick J. Finn, SUNY/Buffalo April Milanek, Youngstown State University Linda Millik, Youngstown State University Matt Monty, Youngstown State University Steve Mountz, Youngstown State University Sarah Russell, Youngstown State University Ben Williams, Youngstown State University Chair: Patricia Hauschildt, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) Bruce Springsteen: Working-Class Hero or Corporate Shill? Anthony Esposito, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania Anthony Peyronel, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania Chair: Beth Cleary, Macalester College Academic Labor—Round Table “Organizing in Higher Education: Is a Working-Class Studies Model Possible?” Jamie Daniel, Director of Organizing and Development, UPI Local 4100, IFT/AFT, AFL-CIO “Working-Class Studies and the Academic Job Market” Christie Launius, Augusta State University “From Working-Class Student to Middle-Class Professor: Navigating a Rite of Passage in the Job Search” Marcy Tucker, University of Central Arkansas Chair: Thomas Shipka, Youngstown State University Class Politics and Crime Fiction “Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction at the Birth of the Cold War” Victor Cohen, Carnegie Mellon University “Crime Fiction and Commodity Fetishism” Jonathan W. Senchyne, Syracuse University “Class, Politics, and Crime Fiction” Tim Sheard, SUNY/Downstate Chair: Sandra Stephan, Youngstown State University Images of Class, Race, and Gender in 19th Century American Literature “Dupes and White Indians?: Mark Twain’s Conflicted Portrayal of Workers in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” Dwayne Eutsey, Independent Scholar “Ad(dress)ing the Nation: A Lifetime of Labor in Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes or,Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House” Michele Fazio, SUNY/Stony Brook Chair: Stephanie A. Tingley, Youngstown State University Prose Reading “The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks” Stephen Haven, Ashland University “Poetry Reading” Michael Henson, Urban Appalachian Council “When I Get to the Other Side, I’m Going to Tell God Almighty About West Virginia!: Mother Jones’ Workers Speak” Patti Capel Swartz, Kent State University Chair: Jim Daniels, Carnegie Mellon University Migrant Workers/Day Laborers “Atlanta’s ‘New’ Working Class: Latino Day Laborers” Terry Easton, Emory University “The Political Economy of Farm Work: Stocking the Migrant Labor Stream” Paul Hancock, Green Mountain College Chair: Tony Budak, Independent Activist 3:15 - 4:45 p.m. Religion and the Working Class “Religious Inspiration in the Making and Unmaking of the American Working Class” Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, West Virginina University and Ken Fones-Wolf, West Virginina University “Improving ‘The Intellectual and Moral Standing or the Jewish Poor:’ Ethnic Community and the Regulation of Amusements in Indianapolis, 1920-1934” Richard Moss, Purdue University “Religion and the Working Class in Proletarian Fiction and Film” Cherie Rankin, Illinois State University Chair: Brian Corbin, Catholic Charities and Catholic Health Services (CWCS Community Affiliate) Promoting Working-Class Studies in the U.S. and U.K. “Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives: Over a Decade's Experience of Running a Workers Culture Program at Michigan State University” John Beck, Michigan State University “Using Theater and Music to Connect College Students and Workers: Staging ‘Forgotten’ in St. Paul, Minnesota’’ Peter Rachleff, Macalester College “New Working-Class Studies in the USA and UK – Past, Present, and Future” Tim Strangleman, Working Lives Research Institute/London Metropolitan University (CWCS International Advisory Committee Member) Chair: Jamie Daniel, Director of Organizing and Development, UPI Local 4100, IFT/AFT, AFL-CIO Women’s Voices, Working-Class Lives: Exploring Identity, Power, and Resistance “The Art and Science of Seventh Grade” Barb Jensen, Metropolitan State University “Remember Where You Come From: Living on the Borders between Class Cultures ” Sandra Jones, Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center “I Didn’t Know There was a Difference” Michelle Wolfson, Wheelock College “My First Closet was the ‘Class Closet’” Felice Yeskel, Co-Director, Class Action Chair: Felice Yeskel, Co-Director, Class Action Corruption Down on the Farm “Farmer John Visits the Corporation” John Demaree Chair: Suzanne Diamond, Youngstown State University Teaching in Conservative Times “Pedagogy of the Confused: Teaching Class Consciousness in the Bush World” Deborah A. Gerson, San Francisco State University*** “Depoliticized Class/rooms and the Moral Equivalence of War: Taking the Heat (or not)” Carole Anne Taylor, Bates College Chair: Cynthia Vigliotti, Youngstown State University 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. RECEPTION 7:30 – 11:00 p.m. Poetry Reading “On My Knees Before These Mighty Heavens” Momodou Ceesay, AE&C Trust of Kayor Galleries “Death by Renaissance” Paola Corso “Detroit Tales: Short Fiction from the Motor City” Jim Daniels, Carnegie Mellon University “Jobs in Between the Cracks: Poems in Remembrance of ‘Good’ Work” Douglas A. Fowler, Youngstown State University Host: Jeanne Bryner, Independent Scholar (CWCS Community Affiliate) May 20, Friday 9:00 - 10:30 a.m. Changes in Economics and Production of the Working Class “The Golden Goose, The Cooked Goose, Donkeys, Elephants, and Sacred Cows: Manufacturing Employment and Inequality in the United States” James R. Anderson, Michigan State University “The Strength of Organized Labor and Functional Income Distribution in Developed Market Economics” Scott Carter, Borough of Manhattan Community College and Rollins College “Lean Manufacturing: The Highest Stage of Capitalism?” Phil Picha, Independent “Class and Household Economic Well-Being in the United States, 1989- 2002” Edward N. Wolff, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and New York University and Ajit Zacharias, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and New York University Chair: Michael Zweig, SUNY/Stony Brook (CWCS International Advisory Committee Member) Labor History, Labor Studies, and New Working-Class Studies: Boundaries and Opportunities Tom Juravich, Labor Center/University of Massachusetts Peter Rachleff, Macalester College John Russo, Youngstown State University (Co-Director, CWCS) Chair: Paul Lauter, Trinity College (CWCS International Advisory Committee Member) Find a Voice: Women, Class, and Culture “The Representation of Women in Radical Publications and Proletarian Literature During the Great Depression” Michael Hale, California State University/Northridge “There’s No Place Like Home? Maxine Hong Kingston, Dorothy Allison, Sandra Cisneros, and the Idea of Home” Michelle M. Tokarczyk, Goucher College Chair: Renny Christopher, California State University/Channel Islands (CWCS International Advisory Committee Member) Working-Class College Students: Institutional Dynamics “Social Class and the Student Body on Main Campuses and Regional Campuses” William DeGenaro, Miami University/Hamilton “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Developing a Sense of Belonging for First- Generation, Working-Class College Students” Rob Longwell-Grice, University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee Chair: Kevin Ball, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) Images and Representations of Working-Class Culture “The Working-Class Experience in Contemporary Australian Poetry” Sarah Attfield, University of Technology (Sydney, Australia) “Working-Class Study: But How Shall We Study?” John Crawford, West End Press “Operation Iraqi Freedom and a Critical Geopolitical Eye: American Cartoonists Powerful Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy” Ray DeCarlo Chair: Greg Moring, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) Working-Class Humor “Working-Class Humor: Myth and Reality” Salvatore Attardo, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) “Learning to Laugh at Labor” Pepi Leistyna, University of Massachusetts/Boston “‘What’s the Worst that can Happen? So the Tornado Picks up our House and Slams it Down in a Better Neighborhood:’ Humor and the Working Class in American Television Comedies” Alessandra Senzani, Florida Atlantic University Chair: Salvatore Attardo, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) Memory and Activism “The Top 10 Mistakes of Middle-Class Activists in Mixed-Class Coalitions” Betsy Leondar-Wright, United for a Fair Economy “Popular Memory and the Unfinished Business of Kent State” Joel Woller, Carlow University Chair: Donna DeBlasio, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) 10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. PLENARY – The Future of Working-Class Studies: Talking with Academic and Small Press Fran Benson, ILR Press/an imprint of Cornell University Press John Crawford, West End Press LeAnn Fields, University of Michigan Press Larry Smith, Bottom Dog Press & BGSU Firelands College 1:15 - 2:45 p.m. Teaching Social Class: A Retrospective Penny Lewis, Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY “Teaching Class Consciousness in a Community College Composition Class”” Kathlene McDonald, Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY “Revising Essay 1: Work and Social Class Identity” Caroline Pari, Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY Chair: Paul Lauter, Trinity College (CWCS International Advisory Committee Member) Deindustrialization: Place and Memory “The Unmaking of the Pennsylvania Working Class: Landscape and Memory in the Juniata Valley” William Hunter, Heberling Associates “Race and Ethnicity in the Upper Ohio Valley, 1940-1965” Lou Martin, West Virginia University “Keeping Community: Economics, Culture, Landscape, and Identity in a Deindustrialized Town” Jennifer L. Worley, Bowling Green State University Chair: Gary Jones Gender, Class, and the Military “‘AEF Society Notes’: The ‘Real’ Masculinity of the Ranks and Visual Culture in Soldiers’ Newspapers” Michael T. Coventry, Georgetown University “Sweater Wars: Sex, Class, and the Nationalization of Morality in World War II” Page Dougherty Delano, Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY “Social Verismo: Social Class Issues in the Visual Arts” Jerry Ross, Lane Community College Chair: Tim Francisco, Youngstown State University Building a Labor Focused Media Presence Frank Emspak, WIN Howard Kling, WIN Chair: Melanie J. Blumberg, California University of Pennsylvania Negotiating for the Future of Work: Ethnographies of Labor in Transition “Contradictions of Consolidation: Work, Social Organization, and Fishery Restructuring in Bristol Bay, Alaska” Karen Hebert, University of Michigan “'Ninety Percent Market, Ten Percent Social': Imagining the Future of Work in Postsocialist Eastern Germany” Angela Jancius, Youngstown State University (CWCS Outreach Director) “‘Idontwannawork Manufacturing Co.’: Defining the FMLA for Human Resources Professionals” Elizabeth Rudd, University of Washington/Seattle Chair: Paul Durrenberger, Penn State Drinking on the Job: Alcohol and the Working-Class “The Death of the Know-Nothings in Chicago: Ethnicity, Alcohol, and the Lager Beer Riot of 1855” Adam Criblez, Purdue University “Toward a Sober Workforce: The Temperance Movement and the Anthracite Coal Miner” Mark A. Noon, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania “Changes on the Construction Job Site: From a Barroom Lunch to Drug Testing in 40 Years” Michael Wood Chair: David Shevin, Central State University 3:00 - 4:30 p.m. Creation of Regional and Ethnic Working-Class Identity “Without Reservation: Exploring Alexie’s Toughest Little Indians— Working Class or Just In-din?” Joan Clingan, Prescott College “Union, Revolution, and Working-Class Identity in Thomas Bell’s Out of this Furnace” Charles Cunningham, Eastern Michigan University “A Culture of Uncertainty: Icelandic Working-Class Immigrants and the Search for Place” John Gudmundson, Medaille College Chair: Rosemary D’Apolito, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) Everything I Have is Blue: Short Fiction about Working-Class Life by More-or-Less Gay Men Rick Feely Rigoberto Gonzalez Wendell Ricketts, Writer and Editor Chair: Michael T. Coventry, Georgetown University Working-Class Academics “Against Masquerading: Everyone in the Department Knows I’m of the Working Class” Rachel Burgess, Boise State University “The Working-Class Academics List: Messages from some Border- Crossers” David Greene, Ramapo College and Barabara Peters, Long Island University “Psychological Strains of the Working-Class Academic” Nick Tingle, University of California/Santa Barbara “Am I a Working-Class Academic?: Self-Descriptions to an Online Community” Jim Vander Putten, University of Arkansas/Little Rock Chair: Jim Vander Putten, University of Arkansas/Little Rock Intersection of Class, Morality, and Gender “Power, Gender, and Style: Current Experiences of a 20-Year Veteran Electrician” Margaret Costello, Ampere Electrical Contracting “Still TalkingTrash: Sweeping Up and Moving On” Andrea Sciacca, SUNY—Empire State and CUNY--JJAY “What's Class Got to Do with It? Moral Values and Public Policy” Michael Zweig, SUNY/Stony Brook (CWCS International Advisory Committee Member) Chair: Larry Hanley, CUNY 4:45 - 7:00 p.m. WCSA BUSINESS MEETING 8:00 - 11:00 p.m. Performance Art “Bread Without Roses: Massachusetts Workers and their Families” Tom Juravich, Labor Center/University of Massachusetts May 21, Saturday Morning Workshops New Films in Working-Class Studies James V. Catano, Louisiana State University Stan West, Columbia College/Chicago Tom Zaniello, Northern Kentucky University Navigating Class and Gender: Imaging into Human Possibilities Elizabeth M. Burke, John F. Kennedy University T. Patrick Donovan, John F. Kennedy University Prison Tour John Russo, Youngstown State University (Co-Director/CWCS) Youngstown Art Tour Salvatore Attardo, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) Sherry Linkon, Youngstown State University (Co-Director/CWCS) Inside the “Steel Museum” Donna DeBlasio, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) Nancy Haraburda, Site Manager, Youngstown Historical Center for Industry and Labor Mill Creek Park History Hike Rich Shale, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) How to Translate the Media and Respond to the Class Bias Inherent in Today’s Commercial Media Frank Emspak, WIN Alyssa Lenhoff, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) Chris Martin, WIN Risking Everything, Reclaiming Lives David A. Grant, Columbus State Community College Sue V. Lape, Columbus State Community College Jan Schmittauer, Ohio University/ Chillicothe Performable Case Studies: Readers’ Theater at the Intersection of Art, Ethics, Pedagogy, and Outreach Richard Robeson, UNC-CH School of Medicine 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. Workin’ On It: Workers, Workshops, and the Creative Process Jazmin Delgado, Pasedena City College Cyndi Donelan, Pasedena City College Efren Michael Lopez, Pasedena City College Crystal Weintrub, Pasedena City College Chair: Phil Chan, CWCS Faculty Affiliate, Youngstown State University Film and Labor: Activism on Screen “Steel Voices: From Mills to Malls and Movies” James V. Catano, Louisiana State University “The Wal-Martization of Labor Film” Tom Zaniello, Northern Kentucky University Chair: Stephanie Tingley, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) The Evolution of Notions of Work in American Culture: High School Students Explore Work, Working-Class Studies, and their Family Work History Barbara Elliot, Gilmour Academy James Gutowski, Gilmour Academy Cindy Sabik, Gilmour Academy High School Students from Gilmour Academy Chair: Jane Van Galen, University of Washington/Bothell Popular Culture and Working-Class Cultural Appeal “‘Goin’ to Jackson’: A Look at the Politics of Mobility and Country Music” Ami LoMonaco, Roosevelt University “Men and Steel: The Company Magazine as Family Album”” Courtney Maloney, Carnegie Mellon University “Greedy Goons: Labour, Hegemony and Fan Reactions to the NHL Lockout” Seth Sazant, Carleton University Chair: Leslie Brothers, McDonough Museum (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) Historicizing Theories of Class in Working-Class Studies “Working-Class Studies in the 1930s” Anthony Dawahare, California State University/Northridge “A Historical Overview of the Retreat from Class in U.S. Radical Politics: 1930-2004” Michael Hale, California State University/Northridge “Class, Race, and Nation: Locating the Study of U.S. Minority Literatures in Working-Class Studies” Dennis Lopez, University of California/Irvine Chair: Dorian Warren, University of Chicago Public Intellectuals and Working-Class Struggles: Where do We go from Here?—Round Table Paul Durrenberger, Penn State University Suzan Erem, Penn State University Staughton Lynd, Independent Scholar Jenn Nichols, Michigan State University Robert T. O’Brien, Temple University Chair: Angela Jancius, Youngstown State University (CWCS Outreach Director) 2:45 - 4:15 p.m. Those Winter Sundays: Academic Women Reflect on their Working- Class Parents Laurel Johnson Black, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Diane Kendig, Bentley College Annette C. Rosati, Clarion University of Pennsylvania Kathleen A. Welsch, Clarion University of Pennsylvania Patti Capel Swartz, Kent State University Chair: Kathleen A. Welsch, Clarion University of Pennsylvania Hollywood Film “Hollywood’s Jimmy Hoffa: The Corruption of American Labor” Ron Briley, Sandia Preparatory School “An American Pathology: Erased Histories in Two Hollywood Film Adaptations” Suzanne Diamond, Youngstown State University Chair: Rick Shale, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) Beyond the Gate: Workers and their Communities in 20th Century Ohio “The Blue-Collar Blues, Revisited: The Lordstown Strike of 1972 and the Retention of the Moral Economy” Gregory M. Miller, University of Toledo “The Univis Strike of 1948 and McCarthyism in Dayton, Ohio” Chris Mize, University of Dayton “Pain, Injury and Loss: 1930’s Railway Claim Records and the Meaning of Work’ Scott Randolph, Purdue University “High Stakes and Last Stands: Global Unionism and the 1976 Rubber Industry Strike” John L. Woods, Purdue University Chair: Martha Pallante, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) K-12 Education "'My Bad': Film Views of Racial Conflict and Resolution at the Turn of the Millennium Aaron Barlow, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania “Education and the American Dream: Considering a Course on Schooling and Social Mobility” Becky Reed Rosenberg, Director, Writing Center/University of Washington/Bothell “Education and the American Dream: A Course on Schooling and Social Mobility” Jane VanGalen, University of Washington/Bothell Chair: Pat Hauschildt, Youngstown State University (CWCS Faculty Affiliate) Labor Solidarity as a Working-Class Value: What is It? Staughton Lynd, Independent Scholar Charlie McCollester, Indiana University of Pennsylvania 4:30 - 6:00 p.m. CLOSING PLENARY—THE FUTURE OF WORKING-CLASS STUDIES Michele Fazio, SUNY/Stony Brook Sherry Linkon, Youngstown State University (Co-Director/CWCS) Tim Strangleman, Working Lives Research Institute/London Metropolitan University (CWCS International Advisory Committee) Dorian Warren, University of Chicago 7:00 – 7:30 p.m. GALLERY TALK with Guy Sudana 7:30 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Appalachian Poets Reading Jeanne Bryner, Independent Scholar (CWCS Community Affiliate) Diane Gilliam Fisher Richard Hague, Purcell-Marian High School Larry Smith, Bottom Dog Press & BGSU Firelands College Host: Larry Smith, Bottom Dog Press & BGSU Firelands College CONFERENCE EXHIBITS Artisan Corrine Bishara Bako The Quiet Depression Guy Suldana Witness Redhand (an artist collaboration), Ed Hallahan Abstracts New Working-Class Studies: Past, Present, and Future James R. Anderson, Michigan State University, anders90@msu.edu “The Golden Goose, The Cooked Goose, Donkeys, Elephants, and Sacred Cows: Manufacturing Employment and Inequality in the United States” This paper examines patterns of expansion and contraction in U. S. manufacturing employment, as distinct from overall employment, over the entire twentieth century.  The objective is to look at the political framework of changes in manufacturing employment patterns.  The further and closely linked objective is to obtain insight into how the degree of inequality is influenced by the prospects for, and reality of, manufacturing job growth or shrinkage. The thesis of this paper, spanning the entire twentieth century, is that there are unmistakable and striking disparities in patterns of manufacturing employment expansion and contraction between the two dominant political parties of the twentieth century.  Democratic Presidents preside over almost all patterns of expansion in manufacturing employment, Republicans over patterns of contraction. Another clear thesis emerges from this study of manufacturing employment.  There appears to be a very close correlation between expansion or contraction of manufacturing employment, and the increase, decrease, or persistence of wage inequality.  Since colonial times, and until the nineteen-eighties, manufacturing was recognized as the goose which lays the golden eggs of prosperity for all, so the correlation of manufacturing and reduction in inequality should not be surprising.      This thesis indicates that several sacred cows of conservative/state/imperial capitalism can be seen as either dead, or showing signs of an economic equivalent of mad cow disease.   Further, the primary theses may provide new elements for a badly needed new intellectual paradigm to undercut and counter the destructively powerful paradigm of deregulation, which the political right has skillfully ridden to political power, and which, it might be argued, is a one word characterization of a crucial ideological transmission belt for inequality. Salvatore Attardo, CWCS Faculty Affiliate, Youngstown State University, sattardo@cc.ysu.edu “Working-Class Humor: Myth and Reality” Most representations of working class humor in mainstream media can be best described as the mediatic equivalent of “slumming.” In the presentation, examples of “authentic” working class humor, using a variety of sources including ethnographic studies of Sardinian (Italy) fishermen and labor cartoons from the US to show how the contents, style, and ideology of “real” working class humor cannot be incorporated in mainstream media, such as television and newspapers because it would clash radically with the standards of decorum, register and ideology of the media. Finally, the issue of the status of so-called working class humor in mainstream media (e.g., Roseanne, blue-collar comedians, etc.) will be addressed. Sarah Attfield, University of Technology, Sydney, Sarah.J.Attfield@student.uts.edu.au The Representation of Working-Class People in Contemporary Australian Poetry Australia is often described as a ‘middle class’ nation and the existence of the working class is denied or masked by the use of euphemisms such as ‘battlers’. Working class people are rarely sympathetically represented in Australian cultural production, and are not often given the opportunity to present their own diverse experiences. Most art forms seem to be deemed as incompatible with working class life, and do not explore notions of class. This can be illustrated by considering how poetry that engages with everyday working class experience is often dismissed as being unliterary, and how some middle class poets misrepresent working class people in their attempts to write about ‘ordinary people’. The study of working class poetry also reveals some of the ways in which class impacts on people’s lives and provides a valuable opportunity to present working class experience to those who operate from a privileged class position. Working class poetry has not been the subject of extensive academic analysis in Australia, and is often dismissed as inferior, devoid of linguistic innovation, and relegated to the category of ideological propaganda. Bringing to light the continued existence of class inequality within Australia through examples of working class poetry and from the perspective of a working class person within academia will hopefully assist in changing attitudes which deny class in order to protect the interests of those who operate from a privileged position. Aaron Barlow, Kutztown University, barlowaa@earthlink.net "'My Bad': Film Views of Racial Conflict and Resolution At the Turn of the Millennium: Freeway (Matthew Bright, 1996), 8 Mile (Curtis Hanson, 2002), and Barbershop (Tim Story, 2002)"   Racial and ethnic attitudes among the young today differ significantly from those of past generations, especially among the working poor of America.  This fact has yet to be adequately addressed by educators or cultural commentators, most of whom continue to approach questions of race and ethnicity on the assumption that the under-thirties of today are carbon copies of their parents and that the immigration of the last decades has not had a critical impact on racial and ethnic attitudes.  These movies (among others) present attitudes that may be confusing to older viewers, but that are commonplaces to the young.  Just what are these changes in attitude, and how are they changing American culture?   Margaret Bayless, Lane Community College, baylessm@lanecc.edu Fat Cats and Underdogs: Work, Class and the American Dream – A Learning Community This learning community came about in an effort to begin what some faculty members hoped would become a Working Class Studies Program even while education in Oregon faced (and continues to experience) draconian budget cuts. An American Working Class Literature and Film course, Writing 123: Research, Film and the American Dream, and an Economics course are presently offered under the umbrella of the Fat Cats and Underdogs title. Students must co-register for the Literature and Writing courses, which are team taught as an overload by two instructors. The other two courses are suggested. We found that merely linking what at one time was six courses primarily focused on class issues, including a history and sociology class, required too many meetings and too much planning for instructors with heavy teaching loads and no financial support. What we created last year was the team-taught combined classes of Literature and Writing, which continues this year with twenty-four students who form a cohort, meeting six hours a week. The students read and discuss literature and film, including works from Paul Lauter and Ann Fitgerald’s Literature, Class, and Culture (until it recently went out of print), Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, and the films 10,000 Black Men Named George and Harlan County USA. They construct research projects that begin with responses to works collected in John Alberti’s The Working Life. As we discuss the writings and films in class, the students begin to see the fictional, analytical, historical, and ethnographic works as possible sources for their research and as different methods for exploring, examining, and challenging issues related to class status. Angela Bilia, Department of English, The University of Akron, abilia@uakron.edu Working-Class Pedagogy and the Politics of Power in First-Year College Writing This paper attempts to define working-class pedagogy through curriculum and classroom practices informed by a Dewey-Freire model of democratic education that empowers students and engages them in active learning. In doing so, I explore how students’ social class and identity influence the negotiation of power and the shaping of class practices. Examining students’ reactions and resistance to the invitation to empowerment can engage us in a meaningful dialogue aiming at transforming education and the dominant culture that surrounds it by exploring ways to democratize schools and society. Ron Briley, Sandia Preparatory School, rbriley@sandiaprep.org Hollywood’s Jimmy Hoffa: The Corruption of American Labor Since On the Waterfront (1954), one of the most popular Hollywood images of American labor has been that of earnest workers manipulated and misled by corrupt union bosses in cahoots with organized crime. This perception of American labor leaders is perhaps best exemplified in the controversial figure of Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, who is the subject of one major biographical film and another fictionalized account drawing upon Hoffa’s life. In F.I.S.T. (1978), Sylvester Stallone, fresh off his success with Rocky (1976), portrays Johnny Kovak, who begins as a humble truck driver and eventually assumes the presidency of the Federated Interstate Truckers. Although Kovak wants to do what is best for the working man, he succumbs to external pressures, displaying personal liabilities as well as structural weaknesses in the labor movement, and makes a pact with the devil in the guise of organized crime. In Hoffa (1992) starring Jack Nicholson in the title role, director Danny Divito provides a similar interpretation of the labor leader’s life. Both films, however, fail to provide perspective on the working class culture and movement from which Hoffa sprang; choosing to focus upon the connections between labor and crime bosses. Accordingly, this paper, drawing upon Thaddeus Russell’s Hoffa biography, Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class (2001), will seek to address the problems with Hollywood’s narrow depiction of Hoffa and the American labor movement. Elizabeth M. Burke, John F. Kennedy University, lizmburke@yahoo.com T. Patrick Donovan, John F. Kennedy University, feelslikerain9@yahoo.com Navigating Class and Gender: Imagining Into Human Possibilities Elusive and mercurial, the categories of sex, gender and class do not thrive when imprisoned within the confines of strict definitions. Today, in this post-9/11 world, the shape-shifting nature of these domains is even more apparent. As the forces of globalization wreak havoc on economies and displace working people all over the world, old definitions of “class” begin to dissolve and morph anew; as movements for domestic partnership rights, transgender equality, and same-sex marriage proliferate, crystallized sexual categories and their resultant gender roles have lost much of their meaning in a sea of ambiguity. For some this undulating terrain – whether in the workplace or in society at large – is unsettling, calling forth a great desire to restore stereotypic and polarized images of gender identity and sexual appropriateness. For others this destabilization of the social fabric heralds a crossing of a threshold into liminal space, a space characterized by unprecedented possibilities for humankind to creatively transform how it relates to itself and to the planet in the 21st century. This workshop will engage differing concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality as they relate to the working class, the ways in which these problematized concepts inform one another, and where they intersect with notions of race and ethnicity. Together we will undertake deconstructing and navigating our contemporary landscape, where rigid and exclusive images of sex, gender and class are no longer workable (if they ever were), and where the restoration of a hyper-masculine, 1950’s stereotype in order to quell our fear of the unknown – whether that’s supported by religious fundamentalism or by evolutionary psychology’s “hard-wired DNA” theories – can only amount to a distortion of our full flowering as human beings. Through discussion, dialogue, and writing exercises, we will co-create a space of mutual respect and curiosity from which to consider the personal and social consequences of these intersections. Drawing from workshop participants’ experience, we will initiate a process of inquiry – into self and society – as to how issues of gender and class identities shape us personally, assist or hamper our navigation through our present culture, and how we may liberate our minds and our bodies to imagine them differently going forward. Rachel Burgess, Boise State University, rahcoon@juno.com Against Masquerading: Everyone in the Department Knows I’m of the Working-Class The Docent explores issues of contrapower and professionalism in academia. The classroom is one of the major stages of performance in the academy. It is an often explosive site of contention where teachers can, and often do, receive the most resistance. When students burrow under the skin deeper than a chigger in summer, goading us to tactlessly respond with an unprofessional, but solidly witty retort, what do we do? Students engage in contrapower in tenebrous ways, and it is often exhausting to deal with. When we are not caught off guard, and the persistent undermining of our authority and intelligence has not quite reached breaking point, we respond to resistance evenhandedly and professionally. But when the first rude comment slides off of our tongues, regardless of a student’s impudent actions, we are sometimes the sole proprietors of the attrition. Our experiences as members of the working-class undoubtedly influence how we manage our classrooms, how we teach, and how we relate to our students and colleagues. We often challenge and question unspoken conventions of academia and the culture that surrounds it—what with its language and codified notions of what is valued as acceptable in body and intellect—by working against and resisting these normative notions. There are ways in which academia negates who we are and undermines our intelligences. For some working-class academics, specifically adjuncts, our classrooms are the only places where we have some voice in how we work in this space. When contrapower makes an obnoxious entrance into our classrooms, it only seems right to remind it who we are. Jean Burton, Wayne State University The Deproletarization of Detroit The “ghetto” was [is] not simply a physical construct; it was [is] also an ideological construct. Urban space became a metaphor for perceived racial difference. Sugrue 1996:229 The 1967 rebellions throughout the nation are often posited as the genesis of ‘white flight’ and the decline of urban areas. In particular the 1967 rebellion in Detroit is the subject of Thomas Sugrue in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Sugrue, a historian, presents a historical account of conflict between white and black working class accelerated by the capitalistic aims of the automotive industry, real estate developers and government agencies prior to the ‘hot summer’ of 1967. I aim to present in this paper a close read of The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Sugrue 1996) as my primary text for an analysis of the deproletarization of Detroit. I am a native Detroiter and my lineage is working class. I was present prior and during the 1967 rebellion, and will offer a counter to Sugrue based on personal experience and informal discussions with family and friends. Lew Caccia, Kent State University, lcacciaj@kent.edu Animals as 18th Century Text: Socioeconomic Class Issues as Contextualized in Goldsmith’s Writing and Gainsborough’s Painting In Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, animals are used in some scenes to help advance the story. The use of animals develops the plot, defines the characters, details the setting, and maintains the humorous tone. Individually, the different scenes convey important points about the role of animals in eighteenthth-century life and about socioeconomic class issues of that era. Furthermore, the socioeconomic issues reflected by Goldsmith’s literature have also been illustrated in country paintings, particularly the paintings of Thomas Gainsborough. The similarity of the messages conveyed by the two genres and their accurate depiction of real life-as verified by modern, non-fiction accounts-truly indicate that Goldsmith shaped his text to create not only an entertaining comedy but also a narrative art. Scott Carter, Borough of Manhattan Community College and Rollins College, Martin.S.Carter@Rollins.edu The Strength of Organized Labor and Functional Income Distribution in Developed Market Economies The waning years of the twentieth century have seen a decline of both the strength of unions and remuneration to labor for most developed market economies (DME’s). This presentation introduces comparative empirical patterns of eight representative DME’s (Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the USA). The evidence presented shows a dramatic decrease in the share of wages in national income for these countries beginning around 1979. Around this same time various indicators of union strength such as union density, role of worker presence in representative bodies at the enterprise level, bargaining influence, and industrial conflict evidenced a decrease in the strength of organized labor in these countries. This paper attempts to make the causal linkages between the decline in worker strength and that of the wage share. This functional distribution-worker strength linkage received a lot of attention in the 1940’s through the 1960’s but has gone relative unexplored in recent decades. Accordingly this paper revives some of the old debates and combines the wage share-worker strength nexus with some recent literature on the social unionism and the progressive potential the union movement can have on macroeconomic policies in advanced democracies. Indeed it is argued that a progressive union and worker movement has the responsibility of inserting itself into the policy debate in order to give voice to those most deleteriously affected by these developments and thus address the both causes and effects of the recent downward spiral of worker strength given the present crisis of neoliberalism. It concludes with a discussion of possible strategies organized labor can adopt to ameliorate this downward spiral and reinsert itself as a major actor in the development of each nation’s respective macroeconomic policy. Renny Christopher, California State University, Channel Islands, renny.christopher@csuci.edu Middle-Class Drag: Performing Gender Across Classes This performance piece blends prose and poetry: I grew up a working-class boy, dressing in cowboy clothes, playing with my toy Winchester rifle (later a BB gun, later still a .22 rifle), my bow and arrow, my GI Joe. I played with toy tools my dad gave me until he taught me to use the real ones, and then I worked construction with him from the time I was eleven or twelve until I left for college at seventeen. There were only two problems with this working-class boy’s childhood: first, I wasn’t actually a boy, anatomically speaking, and second, for every hour I spent playing with guns and tools, I spent three or four hours with my nose “stuck in a book,” as my mother called it, working on becoming a nerdy intellectual, which was not an appropriate activity for a good working-class boy (or girl, for that matter). Thus I always felt divided and different, and my internal feeling was reinforced by how people responded to me. Costume I finish the knot in my tie, slide the clip into place, check out the effect in the mirror. I look like a little girl playing dressup in her father’s clothes. Except, my father never wore clothes like these—fine-woven shirt, silk jacket, slacks and wingtips. My dad wore blue jeans or painter’s pants, a cap with “Ford” embroidered on the front. For dressup, his shirts had snaps instead of buttons. I dressed in miniature imitation of him when I was small, learned to stand like him, walk like him, cock my head the way he did, gestures that don’t fit in this jacket and tie any better than my female body does…. Joan Clingan, Prescott College, jclingan@prescott.edu Without Reservation: Exploring Alexie’s Toughest Little Indians—Working Class or Just In-din? In the 1993 short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie portrays characters, who, with minimal exception, tend to be reservation bound like those in much of his poetry and his novel Reservation Blues. Though life on the reservation virtually necessitates working- or poverty-class subsistence, class difference is all but imperceptible. In his two recent collections, The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) and Ten Little Indians (2003), Alexie takes more of his characters off the reservation and into multi-ethnic and decidedly classed urban settings. Like Esther Belin’s From the Belly of My Beauty and Louis Owens’s Bone Game, Alexie’s portrayals of urban Indians in these collections span economic class. Alexie gives us metropolis dwelling Indians whose vocations include students and teachers, various types of writers, and of course lawyers. Yet how perceptible is class when the social status of those same individuals is colored by dominant stereotypes of the Indian—urban or otherwise? What is the class status of a man who is an Indian and who is a lawyer and who wears braids, when he enters a working-class urban Indian bar? Though the intersection of class and ethnicity is one of the central topics in contemporary literary scholarship, the de-contextualized assimilation of class into ethnicity among Indians has seen little discussion. The word “class” didn’t even appear in a 2002 issue of MELUS dedicated to Native American Literature. This paper will explore how Alexie addresses class in his two most recent short story collections. Victor Cohen, Carnegie Mellon University, vcohen@andrew.cmu.edu Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction at the Birth of the Cold War In this paper I argue that the crime fiction of Communist columnist and reporter Paul William Ryan, written late in the 1940s, represents not only an instance in which a mass-produced literary genre was used to popularize a radical social critique, but that these novels attempted to bridge the growing gap between the radical left and the American working class which began at the onset of the Cold War. In the years immediately following WWII, hard-boiled crime fiction was more famously the home of Mickey Spillane’s ultra-conservative private eye, Mike Hammer, and Raymond Chandler’s isolated loner, Philip Marlowe. While Chandler’s private writings indicate he was obsessed with avoiding politics, Spillane’s fiction shows an almost hysterical drive to engage with them from the right, and together these two authors (the latter the authority on the genre during this era, and the latter its best-selling writer) outline a rhetorical field for hard-boiled crime fiction that was anything but welcoming for perspectives rooted in a working-class left politics. However, the fact that a famous columnist for the West Coast Communist press like Ryan saw opportunities for political engagement in this genre speaks to a vision of this form as a dynamic space capable of harboring a very different set of politics from the ones it most obviously represented. Likewise, his work suggests a view of hard-boiled crime fiction as an organic conduit for political engagement with a working class readership, and helps us today gain a sense of the importance of this segment of popular literary culture during this decade for the left. In particular, this paper looks at Ryan’s three crime novels, The Lying Ladies (1946), The Bandaged Nude (1946), and Many a Monster (1947). I first broadly outline the post-war political landscape for the organized left and the working class, and then discuss these novels in relation to the particular set of tensions this moment witnessed, and also how Ryan worked against the dominant pressures of the form emblematized by its most famous and successful practitioners such as Spillane and Chandler. Margaret Costello, Ampere Electical Contracting, ampereinc@charter.net Power, Gender, and Style: Current Experiences of a 20-year Veteran Electrician I grew up with bricklayers, concrete blocks and blueprints. As a licensed master electrician, female companionship at my job level has been the exception rather than the rule for 20 years. Questions raised as a “diversifying worker” within the building trades reach far beyond gender. Electricity teaches me that environments are controlled rather than innately static. What ideological controls need to be questioned and updated in response to the present? What questions fall between the cracks of political ideology and the lives of building trades workers? Adam Criblez, Purdue University, acriblez@purdue.edu The Death of the Know-Nothings in Chicago: Ethnicity, Alcohol, and the Lager Beer Riot of 1855 During the 1850s, massive immigrations swept through America’s interior. Newly arrived immigrants, especially Germans and Irish, competed with American-born citizens for jobs, social status, and public space. This situation created a growing tension in American cities that led to the formation of the Know-Nothing party, a virulently anti-Catholic political coalition bent on maintaining American hegemony over its foreign-born competition. In Chicago, these ethnic and social class tensions between nativist citizens and ethnic immigrants boiled over in the spring of 1855 in the aptly named Chicago Lager Beer Riot. On April 21, 1855, hundreds of angry German saloonkeepers marched on the Chicago courthouse, eagerly awaiting the verdict of a test case brought against eight of their brethren charged with distributing alcohol on Sunday, a violation of the so-called Sunday Law aimed at curbing public drinking. The ensuing riot, eventually necessitating military intervention, witnessed at least one death, numerous injuries, and created a legacy of mob violence in Chicago. The psychological effects of the riot, however, greatly transcended its limited physical impact on the city. The Lager Beer Riot signaled the demise of the Know-Nothings in Chicago and hastened sweeping political changes ushering in the ascendancy of the Republican Party. Yet despite its immense social and cultural impact on Chicago, it is often overlooked in Chicago’s tumultuous history of riots and political corruption. The rioting, demonstrating the vicious collision of public drinking and immigration, two key aspects of antebellum America, was unique to Chicago but its legacy and psychological effect was universal. Charles Cunningham, Eastern Michigan University, charles.cunningham@emich.edu Union, Revolution, and Working-Class Identity in Thomas Bell's Out of this Furnace While a 1976 reissue of Thomas Bell's Out of this Furnace (1941) has remained in print ever since, the novel primarily enjoys a regional reputation as an account of the unionization of the steel industry and of the experience of Slovak immigrants in the Pittsburgh area. I will argue, however, that its value extends beyond the regional, because it raises important questions for working class studies. The novel focuses on a complex of issues, including class conflict and class identity, ethnic prejudice and ethnic experience, and the relationship between union struggle and a lasting "freedom" for the steelworkers. It chronicles not just the workers' coming to consciousness of their exploitation but their coming to see themselves as worthy of having better lives, a pre-condition for unionization. The process Bell describes thus complicates Lukacs's distinction between a working class in-itself and for-itself in ways that remain relevant. The novel climaxes with the establishment of the CIO steelworkers' union, which represents a victory over company intimidation, ethnic prejudice (often fomented by the companies), and the workers' doubts about their own power. Yet, in the midst of the celebration, it also asks how the union movement can be sustained under changing economic conditions and without structural changes in society itself. Thus, Out of this Furnace both chronicles the enormity of the historic struggles of working people to live better lives and anticipates some of the problems and setbacks familiar today. Jim Daniels, Carnegie Mellon University, jd6s@andrew.cmu.edu Detroit Tales: Short Fiction from the Motor City A reading from Detroit Tales. The stories in Detroit Tales aren't just tales about Detroit—they are tales about urban, working-class America. In these stories, people struggle both to remain in the city and to escape the city. The three main forces in this book are the city, the workplace, and the automobile. In their cars, the people in these stories negotiate the territory between work and home. The conflicts arise in the characters' impulses to veer off their well-worn paths. What can they do? Where can they go? What forces pull them away, and what forces pull them back? In attempting to answer these questions, the characters search for what can provide them with spiritual sustenance. Often, the relief from the drudgery of their daily lives is provided in the fleeting dazzle of fireworks or Christmas lights, but they take what they can. If these stories have one unifying theme, it's that escape is not the answer. When the pulls of friendship and love and personal responsibility draw us back to our ordinary homes and our ordinary jobs, we must trust those pulls, and we must lead those lives with as much dignity as we can muster. Anthony Dawahare, California State University/Northridge, anthony.dawahare@csun.edu Working-Class Studies in 1930s This paper will address the ways in which Depression-era working-class studies challenges a variant of working-class studies today, namely, that which is contained by academic discourses and institutions with ties to the State and multinational corporations. Ray DeCarlo, rayd2147@ameritech.net Operation Iraqi Freedom and a Critical Geopolitical Eye: American Cartoonists Powerful Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy This paper is a tribute to the many American political cartoonists whose talent, courage and wit have not only reported events and policies in a truthful and comical manner, but have also demonstrated courage by standing for what they believe to be the truth. It begins with a brief background of the use of images to report the truth. The nature of political cartoons will be explored as well as their use in the recent turmoil in Iraq. Through the use of a “critical geopolitical eye” in their images in American newspapers, the cartoonists have helped to shape American public opinion. Although the images at times depict a stereotypical view of Islam and the Arab world, they nearly always show the current U.S. foreign policy in the light of the world’s view. Before the initial “shock and awe” phase of the invasion of Iraq began there were cartoons that separated the Hussein regime from Al Qaida, a few questioned the existence of weapons of mass destruction. The cartoons forced their viewers to consider wider implications and consequences of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by challenging the prevalent ways of looking at and therefore understanding the war and the changing state of global interaction. Selected cartoons syndicated in U.S. newspapers from the years 2002 through 2004 will be analyzed. Conclusions will be reached about the significance of political cartoons in the field of geopolitics. William DeGenaro, Miami University, degenaw@muohio.edu Social Class and the Student Body on Main Campuses and Regional Campuses In this presentation, I discuss some of my own experiences working as a tenure-track faculty member within a multi-campus university system. Specifically, I sort through some of the hierarchical dimensions of how main campuses and regional campuses communicate with one another. Though administrators and other constituents of the system rarely use social class as an explicit or deliberate lens for understanding the different dynamics of the campuses, issues of class are ever-present. Indeed, those issues of class inform the rhetoric that various constituents use as they discursively construct campus identities. First, administrators and faculty and staff members frequently use a “student body” trope for differentiating between campuses, referring to the distinct character of the student body on the branch campuses. This kind of rhetoric invariably gets knowing nods from fellow constituents—not surprising, given how class is literally written on the bodies of students on both the main and the regional campus. In Unbearable Weight, Cultural critic and feminist Susan Bordo has revealed how the body becomes a cultural image capable of taking active roles in identity formation. Queer feminist and fiction writer Dorothy Allison has described how social class is one of the key factors determining how the body reflects one’s identity. The “student body” on the main campus is often pampered, white, and extremely skinny, while the “regional campus” body is more likely to be of color and of size and have the markings of various kinds of labor (blue-collar, maternal, etc.). These are physical markings, apparent to the naked eye, so it is obvious why discussion of “student body” has become such a dominant trope. My presentation analyzes the absence of class in the discourse used by constituents of both campuses. Using the theoretical work of Bordo and Allison, I argue that more explicit and thoughtful attention to issues of class in this discourse would be more productive. The “student body” trope has outlasted its usefulness, becoming a euphemism. In particular, I argue that a nuanced class consciousness that acknowledges that the “body” is different (in part) because of a different class affiliation could serve transformative and even activist functions on regional campuses, helping the regional campuses (proudly) define themselves as “working class.” Page Dougherty Delano, Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY, paged1@earthlink.net Sweater Wars: Sex, Class and the Nationalization of Morality in World War II Traditional literary studies tend to perpetuate a view that American women on the World War II home front were ineffectual, removed from national concerns, focused on bobby pins and food rationing. A companion view suggested that women were overly sexed, and careless to the point of being enemies of the state, as seen in the alarm about teenage promiscuity, “amateur” prostitutes, the rising rate of venereal disease, gossipy, selfish women who could thoughtlessly pass on information about troop movements, and a high absentee rate which deemed women workers removed from the war effort. Working class women in particular were often viewed as loose, outside the acceptable (or respectable) parameters of citizenry. Narratives that embed women as citizens, or keep them legitimately excluded, are clearly at stake here. Narratives about loose women, about “sex in the factories”—as a Time article announced, about the sweater wars allow us to examine more closely the ways that working class women were marginalized and kept from the master (masculine) narrative of wartime. Texts written by women who worked in factories, a smattering of fiction from the war period about working class women, women’s journalistic commentaries, and contemporary news articles about women workers in wartime reveal concerns about working women that complicated wartime narratives. Additionally, I look at wartime discussions of morale and morality to suggest that the anxiety about women’s independence during wartime needed to be contained by emphasizing their ‘essential’ bent towards dependence and immorality. In an increasingly centralized government and economy, a mobilized society nonetheless required imagination, new ways of doing things, and individual initiative, but representations of the war period reveal the many ways women were kept from this realm. Suzanne Diamond, Youngstown State University, sdiamond@ysu.edu An American Pathology: Erased Histories in Two Hollywood Film Adaptations The 1951 film, A Place in the Sun, and the 1999 film, The Talented Mr. Ripley, share a quintessentially American preoccupation with the quests of ambitious but disadvantaged central characters. Accordingly, the opening scenes in both films effectively compel empathetic attachment toward these characters and their plights: A young Montgomery Clift, in the earlier movie, is first depicted on a roadside, thumbing a ride out of middle-American obscurity under the intimidating shade of an Eastman Company billboard. This scene amounts to a cinematic template for an identically compelling opening scene in Ripley, where an earnest Matt Damon plays piano under the intimidating shade of a socialites’ gathering, dressed in a borrowed sport jacket with a university emblem. Employing these opening tableaux, both films direct their viewers’ focus towards the pathos of outsiderhood and the ascendant futures presumably merited by their underclass protagonists. Treating the plights of either protagonist skeptically requires information about characters’ pasts which is critical to the novels’ plots but curiously omitted from both film adaptations. It would be useful, for instance, for the film viewer to know that Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths had abandoned the scene of a fatal automobile accident or that Highsmith’s Tom Ripley had engaged in forgery and extortion, both prior to the pathos-inspiring situations employed to open the two films. I argue that these and other omissions from the film plots evidence an American meta-narrative, a mystification about origins with deeply relevant political implications; that the future is everything and that the past is—or should be—irrelevant is urged by each movie’s plot. Whereas the novels equip critical readers to interpret characters’ dismissals of their histories as an “American pathology,” the films implicitly join their protagonists in this selective, skewed and self-serving worldview, a phenomenon which curtails the critical response to social mobility upon which the source novels had insisted. Paul Durrenberger, Penn State University, epd2@psu.edu A Dialogue Between Academics and Activists (roundtable) Public Intellectuals and Working-Class Struggles: Where do we go from here? Paul Durrenberger received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1971 and is a Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. He has done ethnographic fieldwork with tribal and peasant people in northern Thialand, Iceland, Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, Chicago and Pennsylvania. He studies political-economic systems. He is also an applied anthropologist who has researched labor unions, and a member of the American Anthropology Association’s newly formed Labor Commission. Paul’s latest book, co-authored with Suzan Erem, is entitled Class Acts: An Anthropology of Service Workers and Their Union. Other panelists in this roundtable include Suzan Erem, Staughton Lynd, Jennifer Nicols, and Rob O'Brien. With a focus on working-class advocacy, this roundtable takes a critical look at the relationship between scholarship and activism today.  We will open a dialogue between activists working outside of academia, and scholars who attempt to lobby for the interests of working-class and poor people from their positions within the Ivory Tower.  Drawing from the biographies and experiences of panelists and audience members, we will posit the question of whether, and to what extent, the feeling of a need to "exit" academia, in order to support social change in the "real world," is as strong today as it was a generation ago.   Building toward a constructive dialogue, this roundtable discussion will also focus on concrete examples of how alliances between labor and social justice activists working inside and outside of academia might be strengthened. Terry Easton, Emory University, teaston@emory.edu Atlanta’s “New” Working Class: Latino Day Laborers Latinos in the South work in a variety of occupational settings, including onion and tobacco fields, carpet factories and chicken processing plants, hotels and restaurants, construction sites and private homes. In the early stages of the recent Latino migration to the South, men sent money home to support their families in Mexico and Central and South America; more recently, women and children are arriving in greater numbers to join their husbands and fathers. These men and women generally labor where working conditions are dirty and dangerous, health benefits are few, and wages are low. In addition to these workplace issues, Latinos in the South encounter language barriers, cultural differences, and xenophobia. The hiring, working, and living conditions of Atlanta’s Latino day laborers comprise the primary subjects of this presentation. Latino day laborers wait for work at street corners and in for-profit temporary staffing agencies and non-profit hiring halls. They labor primarily in the construction, landscaping, and hospitality industries. Day laborers who wait for work on street corners sometimes get paid less than promised, or they don’t get paid at all. If Latino day laborers are injured at a jobsite, they likely won’t have health insurance or workers’ compensation insurance. Robberies and beatings of Latino day laborers are not uncommon, but these incidents are seldom reported to the police. In this paper, I discuss the plight of Atlanta’s Latino day laborers within the framework of contingent employment, race relations, and local and state codes and legislation. Suzan Erem, Pennsylvania State University, suzan@lastdraft.com Public Intellectuals and Working-Class Struggles: Where do we go from here? A Dialogue Between Academics and Activists (roundtable)        Suzan Erem is freelance writer for unions and nonprofits. She spent more than a dozen years working as a union organizer and staff representative, eventually serving seven years as the communications director of a 25,000-member SEIU local in Chicago. She also served for many years as an elected (volunteer) leader in the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981 until recently stepping down. She is currently finishing up an NSF grant with Paul Durrenberger studying unions and democracy, and they have begun work on their next book about Charleston longshoremen. Her book, Labor Pains: Inside America's New Union Movement, was applauded by Barbara Ehrenreich who said, "I love it! It's about time somebody wrote about union organizing as the adventure it truly is!"     Other panelists in this roundtable include Paul Durrenberger, Staughton Lynd, Jennifer Nicols, and Rob O'Brien. With a focus on working-class advocacy, this roundtable takes a critical look at the relationship between scholarship and activism today.  We will open a dialogue between activists working outside of academia, and scholars who attempt to lobby for the interests of working-class and poor people from their positions within the Ivory Tower.  Drawing from the biographies and experiences of panelists and audience members, we will posit the question of whether, and to what extent, the feeling of a need to "exit" academia, in order to support social change in the "real world," is as strong today as it was a generation ago.   Building toward a constructive dialogue, this roundtable discussion will also focus on concrete examples of how alliances between labor and social justice activists working inside and outside of academia might be strengthened. Anthony Esposito, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, aesposito@edinboro.edu Anthony Peyronel, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, apeyronel@edinboro.edu Bruce Springsteen: Working-Class Hero or Corporate Shill? Throughout his iconic career, Bruce Springsteen has been recognized as a champion of the working class. His 1975 release, Born to Run, focused on the blue collar images of the Jersey shore and resonated with a national audience. In fact, panelist Anthony Esposito has previously argued that Born to Run should be recognized by working class studies scholars as a teaching tool and critical artifact relating to the concepts of community, culture, class, and communication. And Springsteen’s more recent work, including the 2002 release, The Rising, and his 2004 tour in support of John Kerry’s presidential campaign, has only enhanced Springsteen’s status as an advocate of working class causes. Still, critics have sometimes attacked Springsteen as being a prime example of the greed and hype that drive “corporate rock,” especially in terms of his relationship with long-time producer/manager Jon Landau. Is Springsteen the poet laureate of blue collar America, or simply a front man for the corporate interests of the recording industry? In this presentation, the panelists will examine these conflicting aspects of the Springsteen persona. Dwayne Eutsey, Independent Scholar, deutsey@hotmail.com Dupes and White Indians?—Mark Twain’s Conflicted Portrayal of Workers in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court This presentation will attempt to locate Mark Twain and his writings within Renny Christopher and Carolyn Whitson’s broad definition of working-class literature as “works written by working-class people about their class experience.” To place Twain within this definition, the presenter will broadly apply aspects of Christopher and Whitson’s theoretical outline of working-class literature to Twain and two of his major works, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. After a brief discussion of Twain’s working class background, the presenter will discuss the role that journey plays in Huckleberry Finn in capturing working-class culture and language on the Mississippi. The remainder of the presentation will use historical analysis of labor struggles during the Gilded Age to understand Twain’s jarringly conflicted portrayal of workers in Connecticut Yankee. Twain’s satire of Arthurian England can also be seen as a biting commentary on the class conflict created by the Industrial Revolution. Consequently, his characterization of serfs in feudal England as “white Indians” and “dupes” may at first appear contemptuous of Industrial workers; however, these sentiments actually reflect Twain’s own internal class conflict, one rooted in his working-class sensibilities and his ambition to be part of the business elites of his era. This personal division between the go-getter businessman Samuel Clemens and the radical democrat Mark Twain is not only reflected in the disorienting (and self-destructive) split personality of Connecticut Yankee’s narrator—it is illustrative of the deep class divisions in America during the Gilded Age, the fault lines of which continue to cause tremors in our own time. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, West Virginia University, and Ken Fones-Wolf, West Virginia University Religious Inspiration in the Making and Unmaking of the American Working Class Exit polls from the 2004 Presidential election made clear just how important religion is (and has been) as a political force, not just in the South but also among the swing-state voters in states like Ohio and Missouri. The polarization of the nation into red and blue states underscores even deeper divisions between the more traditional morality of rural America and the modernist impulses of cosmopolitan urbanites. Lost in the broader picture are the ways that religious issues have divided working people and diminished the political voice of the labor movement and the working class more generally. This should not be surprising. Throughout the industrial era, Christianity, of both the Protestant and Catholic varieties, has been crucial to the making as well as the unmaking of American working-class solidarity. This paper will explore the influence of Catholicism and Protestantism in the making and the unmaking of the labor movement in the critical era of the CIO. Christian social justice ideas in the 1920s and 1930s provided a powerful critique of American capitalism and helped justify the labor movement’s demand for social and legal reform. At the same time, this Christian social message was not without limits for the working class. Religious groups expected workers and their unions to adhere to certain principles and codes of conduct in exchange for their support. When labor failed to meet those standards Christian clergy could rescind their backing and counsel their followers to sever connections with unions. Thus, religious inspirations helped both make and unmake the advances associated with the New Deal industrial relations system, suggesting important lessons for the working class of today. Douglas A. Fowler, Youngstown State University, dfowler17@excite.com Jobs in Between the Cracks: Poems in Remembrance of “Good” Work I wrote these poems to celebrate all those jobs I’ve had jammed in, around, and after college—steelworker, custodian, machinist and cabinet maker; digging a line on a north Idaho fire and work as a farm hand. The poems become a requiem for the loss of this kind of good work—that temporary historical condition in which many of us were lucky enough to spend our intellectually formative years(a fortunate time in which we enjoyed the harvest of American labor’s struggle. I will always consider these jobs a central part of an authentic education and I want my writing to be a way of making this experience part of that voice crying out a need for meaningful work amidst our new managerial and retail landscape. At eighteen I was a steelworker, paying dues to USWA Local 2243, and on the contract pay-scale with full benefits. Now we send our kids to work in malls for minimum wage. Good work assumes conditions of justice. It can also encourage connections with land, water, air, and how things are really made. Consider the following: I have a geologic map of the Mesabi Iron Range: color-coded bedrock like books, each page in blue-gray hematite, signatures of red jasper where bacteria bloomed, died off, bloomed again in the tides of a former world, tides like the work that now only comes and goes in the open-pit Hull-Rust-Mahoning Mine, a name like the rusted hulls of lake-boat iron-ore freighters bound for Cleveland; bound for Ashtabula. I’ve lived in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley and looked into liquid iron’s unearthly heat, prepped the iron molds poured full of liquid steel, rode brakeman on a narrow-gauge pulling ingots. We lived off iron, drove on roads of iron slag, ate from and breathed in that metal mined in the red Mesabi Iron Range. David Greene, Ramapo College, dgreene@ramapo.edu The Working-Class Academics List: Messages from Some Border-Crossers The Working-Class Academics discussion list (WCA) came into being in 1994. Barbara Peters founded the list after an unpleasant encounter on the Women’s Studies listserv demonstrated the need for a place where academics from poverty and working-class backgrounds could connect with one another. Since that time, the WCA has attracted hundreds of subscribers through little more than word-of-mouth publicity (there is a simple website and there has been sporadic interest by the press). Subscribers include undergraduate and graduate students, active and retired faculty members, professional staff people and a few administrators. Much of the traffic on the list has involved questions and advice about surviving in the academic world and in the world “back home.” Practical suggestions, moral support and inspiring tales have helped members as they’ve chosen majors, dropped in and out, interviewed, gotten jobs, felt alienated, published, felt like imposters, gotten tenure, gone on strike, been fired, achieved middle-class incomes, taught courses, drowned in debt, mentored students, and interacted with the folks back home. There have also been many discussions about defining social class—figuring out where one fits (many people join the list by posting their biography and then earnestly asking whether or not they belong). In addition to much sharing of academic resources, there have also been discussions of many poverty-class/working-class issues and themes—including music and food (a cookbook has been in the works for several years now). This largely qualitative analysis takes us through the labyrinth of the close to 2000 messages posted between March 2003 and March 2005. John Gudmundson, Medaille College, jgudmundson@medaille.edu A Culture of Uncertainty: Icelandic Immigrant Workers and the Quest for Place The search for place was common among late nineteenth century working-class immigrants, particularly Icelandic Americans during a prolonged time of transition between the loss of home in Iceland and founding of home in America. As homesteads and communities were established, dismantled and re-established throughout the mid-west, Icelandic immigrants endured a lingering sense of displacement in their continued quest for home. Further to Kristjana Gunnars and Bill Holm's discussions of perpetual exile and marginality in Icelandic America, an analysis of the poems, essays and letters by nineteenth century farmer and poet Stephan G. Stephansson reveals a strong desire for place and suggests an even deeper culture of uncertainty – a condition that proved problematic in the settling of America. Moreover, the juxtaposition of disparate poetic forms and literary genres in Stephansson’s texts reflects a number of enduring struggles unique to the Icelandic American experience: the widening chasm between remembered and invented homelands, a growing conflict between uncertain ethnic identity and cultural assimilation, and an underlying tension between the dual roles of marginal immigrant and everyday worker. These ongoing conflicts are crucial defining points in the Icelandic immigrant’s quest for place - before, during and after the founding of home. Paul Hancock, Green Mountain College, hancockp@greenmtn.edu The Political Economy of Farm Work: Stocking the Migrant Labor Stream The premise of this work is that the system of farm labor migration from the periphery to the core, lasting for more than sixty years can only be properly understood by examining the whole of the institutional apparatus that has been constructed to perpetuate this process. This is an effort to expand the scope of studies into the forces that have shaped the phenomenon of the farm worker migrant stream to include complementary and inter-institutional factors. Economic forces are but one set of factors that explain the existence of a system of supplying labor from the developing to the developed economies. To understand the system of labor migration we have to examine the institutional apparatus perpetuating the conditions that promote migration. These institutional apparatus have developed and changed with circumstances fro one historical epoch to another. The first part of this paper examines some of the history of these government and corporate practices and the nature of the cultural, social and economic conditions within which they operated. The major focus is on the example of Jamaican migrant farm workers without presupposing a model extending to other immigrant and nonimmigrant flows. The implication is, however, that similar histories have undoubtedly unfolded throughout the colonial, neo-colonial and modern period. The paper then turns to a discussion of Wallerstein’s theory and its adaptation to the study of migrant farm labor. Lastly, I discuss two elements of what would be parts of a broader focus for the study of the migrant farm worker system. Stephen Haven, Ashland University, shaven@ashland.edu Poetry Reading: The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks I will read from my collection of poems, The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks. The geographic heart of the book is the Mohawk Valley, the Mohawk River, and the mill town, Amsterdam, New York, where I grew up. The town was dominated by old textile factories beginning to shut down. My distributor’s description of the book is as follows: “Along with the trails through the industrial wilderness, the river, the bars, and the young poet’s preparations for escape, we see his preacher father and the family life that finally yields him up. Later the poet pauses to treat another kind of New England background, the "Puritan graveyard" of the seventeenth century, imaginatively recreating the distant ghosts that still enter his thoughts in Provincetown at the Millennium. Finally, in the section "Homework," his thoughts return to his birthplace, as he seeks to reconcile his memories of home with his departure and survival.” A brief review, in The Amherst Review, describes the books as follows: “Haven’s book of poetry is thick with place. He works from the landscape of his ancestors, who landed on Cape Cod in the 1600s, and the landscape of his boyhood, spent in the dying mill towns of New York’s Mohawk Valley. His language is agile and moodily elegant, but this lyricism belies the emotional desolation of his subjects. A fight between brothers, the inscrutability of a river, a girl’s premature motherhood—he handles these scenes without sentimentality, and still they speak of ruin.” Patricia M. Hauschildt, Youngstown State University, phauschildt@ysu.edu Literacy for Working-Class Teachers and Students: A Dialogue with Patrick Finn In my role as a teacher educator, I have found that readings, questions, assignments, and/or discussions about race and gender often raise resistant attitudes and comments, from mildly argumentative to blatant racist or misogynist. I remain calm but firm in stating that as future teachers, we are morally and ethically bound to teaching all children, which includes every type of diversity and learning difference. I have tried a variety of readings and assignments with varying degrees of success. However, since I have included Patrick Finn’s Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest (SUNY Press) in a Reading in the Content Area course, my students first identify with the inequity and discrimination evident in their own life experience as “classed.” The safety of talk about social class experiences seems to free students to then themselves raise all other forms of discrimination, and, subsequently how teachers can understand school discrimination based on class. One student writes: “This book opened my eyes to the challenges culture presents in a school.” Another states: “I learned that social class has a lot to do with reading and class behavior. Working-class teachers tend to stress students’ behavior and education for jobs/careers. What we as teachers in a working-class environment must do is stress education as a virtue in and of itself.” Finally: “I have learned that class plays a huge role when it comes to opportunities available to students. I am still struggling with the reality that teaching is largely affected by a teacher’s background and students’ backgrounds. Reading Finn has prepared me to be as objective as I can possibly be.” The Conference session is a dialogue between YSU teacher candidates and Patrick Finn to raise personal and complex questions about teaching and working-class. Karen Hébert, University of Michigan, hebertk@umich.edu Contradictions of Consolidation:  Work, Social Organization, and Fishery Restructuring in Bristol Bay, Alaska Over twenty years ago, a study of commercial fishing in Bristol Bay, Alaska, deemed it "an occupation in transition":  fishing was becoming a calculated economic pursuit rather than a "way of life," it was claimed, and "traditional" features of fleet social organization were eroding.  My recent research on the struggling salmon industry in southwest Alaska suggests that this so-called transition never fully materialized.  Moreover, as this paper examines, fishers' present efforts to develop and debate industry restructuring plans are deeply informed by the very conceptions of work and belonging that scholars of the 1980's dismissed as obsolete.  In a current industry climate marked by sweeping transitions of its own-increasing foreign competition, growing corporate retraction, shrinking profits, and great pressure by state officials and industry analysts to "consolidate," or downsize, the fishing workforce-labor itself has become a site fraught with contradiction, representing both sources of fisher independence and industry competitiveness as well as their undoing.  Through an exploration of the contradictions underlying fishing work and social solidarity in contemporary Bristol Bay, the paper suggests that labor-in-transition often involves the recuperation, reanimation, and reimagination of longstanding practices and identities as much as their abandonment or creation anew. Sherry Holland, Wayne State University, ypsi_film@yahoo.com Good Girls Don’t but I Do: Class, Race, Gender, Education, Work, and Femininity This presentation will examine the complex and multiple identities of a group of white working class high school girls in the Detroit-Metro Detroit area. Why study these girls/young women and their lives? White working-class girls and women have been almost invisible within the discourses of class, race, gender, reproduction, and resistance. Also, within the context of globalization these girls and women as workers will be performing a large majority of the worlds work. Yet, the complexities of their lives have been ignored both in a local and/or the global context. Feminist and Marxist have contributed very little to the understanding of the complex multiple identities of these women’s lived lives. Why have white working class women been ignored and under-theorized by the very groups who purport to be advocates of the working class and women? Working class, youth culture, and work culture are read as masculine in most current literature. How can this be changed, what needs to be done, what type of research? What I will present for the conference is a paper based on a narrative of a group of suburban working class girls in the 1980’s attending high school in a gentrifying working class suburb of Detroit. Throughout the early 80’s several riots occurred at the high school we will call Rust Belt High. These riots involved two social categories at the high school the ‘Burnouts’ and ‘Jocks’. The definitions of these categories ‘Burnout’ correlate to the working class students at the school and ‘Jock’ refer to the interloping middle class students entering the school at this time. This presentation will explore how the girls rather than passive supporters of the boy’s rebellion in these riots were instead active participants and in many activities initiators of the confrontational behavior. Issues explored are: agency, subjectivity, identity, reproduction, and resistance, economic restructuring, and oppositional femininity. William M. Hunter, Heberling Associates. whunter@heberlingassociates.come The Unmaking of the Pennsylvania Working Class: Landscape and Memory in the Juniata Valley Central Pennsylvania is one of America's early industrial heartlands. Capital and material drawn from this region fed the development of America's first fully integrated steel complex; Ironmasters developed techniques and processes in the dispersed iron plantations of the Juniata Valley before applying them to the concentration of large-scale industry in Johnstown. Yet, with the flight of capital and de-industrialization, the working-class heritage on which the history of the Juniata region rests continues to fade from public memory. The material and social contributions of the working-class steadily erode while capital's capstone features, created of durable materials and well maintained, endure and serve to structure a selective sense of place and identity. The celebration of elite history and preservation of high style artifacts reinforce pastoral geographic images, first constructed by Pennsylvania Railroad travel literature und then propagated by popular landscape painting. Area residents now popularly perceive the Juniata Valley as “country,” the construction of the rural identity crippling the capacity for the working class to recognize itself, much less to organize. This paper chronicles the extraction of value from the labor and resources of the region, the disintegration of the iron industry, the rise of the steel complex and the erasure or the industrial working class from the 1andscape. We examine in particular the promotion of pastoral landscape imagery and its role in the formation of the rural landscape, and conclude with a prescription of the recovery of working class history, heritage, and identity. Angela Jancius, Youngstown State University (CWCS Outreach Director), acjancius@ysu.edu 'Ninety Percent Market, Ten Percent Social': Imagining the Future of Work in Postsocialist Eastern Germany As part of my ongoing fieldwork in Leipzig, I asked people to describe their experiences with the near totalizing deindustrialization that followed reunification, and to imagine what steps should be taken to deal with mass unemployment in the formerly socialist East.  Positioning myself as a narrator in a dialogue created by residents, this paper draws particularly from one retired metal worker and union negotiator's analysis of the East German hydraulics industry's collapse, the failure of the European "social market economy" to be "social," and of a growing interest in the reinvention of economic cooperatives. Selmin Kara, Wayne State University, selmin@wayne.edu Car Theft, Transition and Transgression in Bulgaria This paper examines how Bulgaria, an Eastern European country, adopts a marginal social practice during its transition from a predominantly working class culture towards market economy and nouveau entrepreneurship under the framework of accession to the European Union. The EU enlargement is based on the premise of a Europe without borders; yet, as national borders are gradually eradicated, new boundaries are erected to keep the insider/outsider, self/other dichotomy intact. Despite the rhetoric of an integrated Europe, Bulgarian identity remains at the margins of the European cultural center. The Copenhagen criteria mean that for Bulgaria, the time has come to abandon the ghosts of its past and embrace its future. Yet, for many, the glass of progress towards a functioning market economy remains half-empty: the future everyone dreams about has not arrived yet for those who have to fight with the unexpectedly high rates of transition inflation, unemployment, and crime rates. As for the other half of the glass, it is full of pre-transition ghost memories. All too often, the gray, ugly, unflattering landscape of the old regime is emotionally charged with deep nostalgia for a place that once was so familiar, but now is “other”. State sponsored cradle-to-grave welfare, full employment, and low crime rates represent the lighter side of the old regime. For those who remain reluctant to let go off their ghosts, the transition from state socialism to market economy signifies more than economic data indicating incremental progress. For individuals under transition, fulfilling the community acquis is not the number one goal; surviving is. The paper looks into the changing property regime and class nature in Bulgaria to analyze how it affects Bulgarian subjectivity. Specifically, it interprets the car theft phenomenon in Bulgaria as a means of everyday resistance to the hegemonic aspects of such changes. Car theft is defined as a common civilian practice: anonymous, disguised and opportunistic. From the perspective of the EU, it is seen as a problematic activity on the Eastern European territory. In Bulgaria, however, the enterprise of car theft (which can also be considered as a newly invented property exchange regime in the “free” market economy) mirrors the opportunistic, liberal, pragmatic geography of Bulgaria’s failed transition and might signify a new way of traveling in-between closed systems of immobility for the people. In car theft, we can see a brute, commodified interpretation of market economy as “the survival of the fittest” in a Hobbesian world where actors no longer enjoy cradle-to-grave security, rather, they are in a state of a perpetual struggle for survival. These nouveau entrepreneurs view the regime ancien as null and void, the social contract based on state ownership, which legitimated the ancient regime is no longer valid, while the new property regime of liberalization and privatization lacks the proper institutions to legitimize itself. Therefore, the ensuing legitimacy gap is seized by opportunistic actors as a profitable way to create an alternative exchange market, where stolen cars become a fetishized commodity.  Tom Gallagher ,The Balkans after the Cold War : From Tyranny to Tragedy, London New York : Routledge, 2003 Ami LoMonaco, Roosevelt University, Amityvale@aol.com “Goin’ to Jackson”: A Look at the Politics of Mobilityand Country Music   Country music songs are sprinkled with tales of hardship and struggle that come along with the lived experiences of working class culture. One recurring theme throughout country music is the concept of mobility and home.  I will be focusing specifically on the lyrics of Johnny Cash’s music and the idea of mobility.  I will be addressing the politics of mobility in regards to the lives of the working class. In my paper I will also be examining the contradictory theme of home present in country music lyrics. By delving into the working class culture, I will be looking at how socio-economic conditions shape peoples lives and how the politics of mobility affects us on a personal and cultural level.  The idea of home and location is such a fragile aspect of the working class existence. Johnny Cash’s music is thought to be representative of the working-class struggle and lives.  Using the lyrics of his songs I will be examining the concepts of home and mobility in regards to class and gender. By examining the juxtaposition of working class mobility and America’s romance with the notion of home I will be looking at the fragility associated with the working-class sense of home present in the lyrics of country music. Staughton Lynd, Independent Scholar, salynd@aol.com Public Intellectuals and Working-Class Struggles: Where do we go from here? A Dialogue Between Academics and Activists (roundtable) Staughton Lynd belongs to the generation that at the end of the 1960s considered becoming "colonists" in industry.  Instead, he and his wife Alice Lynd became lawyers.  As lawyers at a legal services office in Youngstown, Ohio, Staughton helped to lead the struggle to reopen steel mills under worker-community ownership, and he and Alice helped to create Workers Against Toxic Chemical Hazards (WATCH), a retiree organization Solidarity USA, and the Workers Solidarity Club of Youngstown, which existyed for more than 20 years and publiwhed the monthly newsletter IMPACT.  Staughton also served for three years as educational coordinator of Teamsters Local 377 during the years of Carey's presidency. Other panelists in this roundtable include Paul Durrenberger, Suzan Erem, Jennifer Nicols, and Rob O'Brien. With a focus on working-class advocacy, this roundtable takes a critical look at the relationship between scholarship and activism today.  We will open a dialogue between activists working outside of academia, and scholars who attempt to lobby for the interests of working-class and poor people from their positions within the Ivory Tower.  Drawing from the biographies and experiences of panelists and audience members, we will posit the question of whether, and to what extent, the feeling of a need to "exit" academia, in order to support social change in the "real world," is as strong today as it was a generation ago.   Building toward a constructive dialogue, this roundtable discussion will also focus on concrete examples of how alliances between labor and social justice activists working inside and outside of academia might be strengthened. Martin Kley, University of Texas at Austin, martin_kley@yahoo.de From Industrial to Post-Industrial Production: A Challenge for Working-Class Literature Working-class culture, in its various manifestations and practices, can be seen as a negative response to the fragmentation of social life that was brought about by the capitalist principle of division (division of labor, separation of culture and labor, etc.). While it promotes a more wholesome understanding of social life (“Isn’t labor also art?” Or, conversely: “Isn’t art also labor?”), the problem of working-class culture over the last century has been that the very source of this fragmentation, industrial life, has - logically, one may say - been at the same time the prime (and often exclusive) site of proletarian culture and artistic practice. The result has often been characterized as something of a vicious circle: The more working-class art thematizes industrial life (even when in opposition to most of its features), the less able it becomes to think and imagine outside of its realm (resulting, for example, in the celebration of Stalin’s first Five-year Plan by German workers). Furthermore, the traditional reliance on industrial topics poses a new problem today: What can be the home turf of working-class culture in an allegedly post-industrial society with its highly diversified (and “hidden”) working-class? Drawing examples from working-class literature within the German context (from Weimar proletarian writers such as A. Grünberg and W. Bredel, the “Bitterfelder Weg” in the GDR, the “Dortmunder Gruppe” in West Germany, and post-unification Germany), I will re-evaluate dead-ends and chances that the synthesis of material and cultural production reveals. My paper’s basic premise is that, while it once was fully justified to criticize the ideology of production of much of working-class literature (e.g. by pointing out the transition from the factory to the “social factory”, or by shifting the focus from production to re-production), today the task for practitioners and theoreticians of working-class culture is to again recognize material production beneath consumption and “symbolic” production, and to point out that the former, as opposed to the latter, allows for collective practice in labor, culture, and the social fabric as a whole. Pepi Leistyna, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Pleistyna@hotmail.com Learning to Laugh at Labor I have been working on a film called Class Dismissed: How Television Frames the Working Class with the Media Education Foundation. It is an analysis of the representations of the working class on entertainment television. The focus of this talk will be on how corporate media work to ridicule workers and why we need to take our entertainment seriously. Tim Libretti, Northeastern Illinois University, T-Libretti@neiu.edu Imagining the End of Capital as We Know It: Debating the Objective of Working-Class Studies through Readings of Cheri Register’s Packinghouse Daughter and Maureen Brady’s Folly This paper will compare Cheri Register’s working-class memoir Packinghouse Daughter and Maureen Brady’s novel Folly in terms of the way each presents a narrative of working-class advocacy and self-activity and imagines an objective and end to that activity. I will evaluate each narrative in terms of how it answers the question “What are we fighting for?” and will assess as well its optimal usefulness as a narrative for informing working-class studies methodology and practice. In particular, I will argue that Register’s narrative is one that finally sustains and perpetuates the capital/labor divide as we know it by continuing to imagine labor’s dependence on capital. While the text rages against the gross inequality in the U.S. and the lack of respect accorded labor, in its attempt to restore dignity to labor it glorifies working-class life in a way that fails to imagine the re-organization of work and economy in the U.S. On the other hand, Brady’s novel develops a narrative of working-class resistance that transcends traditional models of union activism and capital/labor relations, innovatively imagining labor becoming or taking over capital and organizing production on its own behalf. While the workers in the novel “successfully” negotiate a contract through collective bargaining, they come to see that this type of labor/capital relation sustains their dependence on and subjugation to capital and instead seek to explode this binary by opening their own factory. In foregrounding self-determination as the end of working-class struggle, the novel, I will suggest, provides a utopian narrative for working-class studies. Courtney Maloney, Carnegie Mellon University, cmaloney@cmu.edu Men and Steel: The Company Magazine as Family Album This paper is part of a larger project about the ways working-class people, and their history, have been represented in the public relations literature and photography of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. Throughout the larger project, I look at company representations of workers during the height of union power to see how J&L used cultural interventions to cope with the changing power relations brought by the union era. One such intervention is the company magazine. Company magazines have long been used by corporate publicity and advertising departments to represent a particular vision of the corporation to its employees, and a particular vision of the workers to themselves. Often inaugurated with the goal of building “communication” or of increasing “understanding” between management and the work force, this communication and understanding typically goes one way, from the company to the workers. J&L’s company magazine, Men and Steel, largely conforms to this type. However, in its early years of publication, especially from 1947 to the mid-fifties, Men and Steel stood out among other steel industry company magazines in that it evidenced a remarkable level of participation on the employees’ part. Workers would share personal stories and send in family snapshots of vacations, holidays, weddings and graduations, and compete for the honor of having a photograph chosen for use as a magazine cover. This paper examines the ways in which this level of worker participation and self representation in the company magazine seems to suggest a certain kind of “ownership” of the publication on the part of the employees, and also makes the Men and Steel of this era particularly effective company propaganda. Lou Martin, West Virginia University, wvulou@yahoo.com Race and Ethnicity in the Upper Ohio Valley, 1940-1965 This presentation will discuss the changing role of race and ethnicity in the Upper Ohio Valley between 1945 and 1965. While the sons and daughters of immigrants continued to participate in their ethnic communities, they shared more experiences with the larger white working-class community. Unions, companies, schools and the military stressed a uniform American identity over ethnic backgrounds. At the same time, segregation by race persisted in many ways. African Americans served in segregated units during World War II, and some schools, theaters, and pools remained segregated for a decade or more after the war. Many scholars have argued that the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s provoked a backlash from the white working class that culminated in the fragmentation of the New Deal coalition. This argument rests on working-class ethnic and racial identities, and a closer examination of them is necessary. This paper considers evidence from the towns of Weirton, West Virginia and Martins Ferry, Ohio. The steelworkers that lived in these towns during that period formed the backbone of the valley’s economy, and Weirton Steel and Wheeling Steel collectively employed a significant number of these workers. African Americans and the children of immigrants worked side by side with native whites, but African Americans were largely excluded from white communities outside of work. Similarly, while the CIO unions sought to promote a culture of unity, the United Steelworkers of America made it difficult for African Americans to join white workers in the skilled trades at Wheeling Steel. These institutional influences reinforced working-class racial identities that proved especially divisive by the 1960s. Chris Mize, University of Dayton, mizechrs@notes.udayton.edu The Univis Strike of 1948 and McCarthyism in Dayton, Ohio On May 5th, 1948 a small headline on page twenty-three of the Dayton Daily News announced, “658 Workers on Strike at Univis Lens.” This strike eventually evolved into one of the most important and influential strikes in Ohio labor history. It transformed the area around the Univis plant into militarized zone, protected by 1,200 National Guardsmen armed with machine guns, armored cars, and three thirty-ton Sherman Tanks. The UE locals who organized the strikers were never forgiven for their participation in the Univis Strike, and their leaders were relentlessly persecuted by both the state and federal government. Between 1948 and 1955 perjury trials and HUAC investigations in Dayton, Ohio mirrored the attacks occurring on the national stage on the UE International union by the CIO and anti-Communist crusaders. The UE leaders of the Univis Strike were forced to testify before the House Labor and Education Committee and HUAC about their involvement in the strike and their connections to the Communist party. Two of them, Melvin Hupman and Walter Lohman, were convicted for perjury and sentenced to five years in jail. When the strike began during the summer of 1948, the UE was one of the largest labor unions in Dayton. The heads of the UE locals rallied between 6,000 and 15,000 union members to march in support of the 600 or so striking Univis Lens Company workers. When Melvin Hupman emerged from prison in 1960, the UE was no more than a memory in Dayton. Daytonians remembered the UE as the Communist led union that purposely organized the most violent strike in their city’s history. More than this, The Univis Lens strike and its repercussions were among the first examples of how Taft-Hartley and the fever of McCarthyism combined on the local level to retard or outright destroy liberal and progressive political movements. Jennifer Nicols, Michigan State University, jjnichol73@hotmail.com Public Intellectuals and Working-Class Struggles: Where do we go from here? A Dialogue Between Academics and Activists (roundtable)   Jenn Nichols is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Michigan State University, where she has served in her labor union, the Graduate Employees Union, as Information Officer, Steering Committee and Grievance Committee member, and co-chief negotiator. She has worked as a union organizer for both the Michigan and the American Federation of Teachers. A long-time activist, Jenn has participated in campaigns for workers’ rights, reproductive rights, local environmental issues, and public awareness and understanding of HIV/AIDS. She has also worked as a volunteer ESL and adult literacy tutor. Her dissertation project examines the political implications of the changing representations of working-class women throughout twentieth-century U.S. literature. Other panelists in this roundtable include Paul Durrenberger, Suzan Erem, Staughton Lynd and Rob O'Brien. With a focus on working-class advocacy, this roundtable takes a critical look at the relationship between scholarship and activism today.  We will open a dialogue between activists working outside of academia, and scholars who attempt to lobby for the interests of working-class and poor people from their positions within the Ivory Tower.  Drawing from the biographies and experiences of panelists and audience members, we will posit the question of whether, and to what extent, the feeling of a need to "exit" academia, in order to support social change in the "real world," is as strong today as it was a generation ago.   Building toward a constructive dialogue, this roundtable discussion will also focus on concrete examples of how alliances between labor and social justice activists working inside and outside of academia might be strengthened. Rob O'Brien, Temple University, robrien@temple.edu Public Intellectuals and Working-Class Struggles: Where do we go from here? A Dialogue Between Academics and Activists (roundtable) As an engaged anthropologist, Rob O’Brien has worked closely with community organizations, city and state government, healthcare providers, and educators on a wide range of poverty-related issues. Rob organized and ran a health advocacy and education group for Philadelphia inmates, former inmates, and their families. He has taught and consulted for a community education course for people living with HIV/AIDS and co-directed a summer service learning project for students at an inner-city technical high school. He was a member of the steering committee which eventually won union recognition for graduate employees at Temple University. Rob has also taught courses on urban social change, race and ethnicity, service learning, space and place, culture in the U.S., and underdevelopment and structural adjustment. For his dissertation fieldwork, conducted in a deindustrialized, multiracial, and multiethnic neighborhood of Philadelphia, Rob has sifted through medicalized, criminalized, and racialized discourses about the roots of injustices faced by people living with HIV/AIDS, with substance use and mental health issues, and with a host of chronic physical ailments that go untreated as a result of marginalization. This fieldwork has been done in an effort to trace out understandings of social networking and subject creation held by these people, their advocates, and those who would “develop” them out of the community in an effort to find potentialities for connecting with “non-medical” struggles. Other panelists in this roundtable include Paul Durrenberger, Suzan Erem, Staughton Lynd, and Jennifer Nicols. With a focus on working-class advocacy, this roundtable takes a critical look at the relationship between scholarship and activism today.  We will open a dialogue between activists working outside of academia, and scholars who attempt to lobby for the interests of working-class and poor people from their positions within the Ivory Tower.  Drawing from the biographies and experiences of panelists and audience members, we will posit the question of whether, and to what extent, the feeling of a need to "exit" academia, in order to support social change in the "real world," is as strong today as it was a generation ago.   Building toward a constructive dialogue, this roundtable discussion will also focus on concrete examples of how alliances between labor and social justice activists working inside and outside of academia might be strengthened. Caroline Pari, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, cpari@bmcc.cuny.edu Revising Essay 1: Work and Social Class Identity The Tenth Anniversary of the Youngstown Working-Class Studies Conference has inspired me to recall the last ten years of my teaching writing at a community college in New York City. Ten years ago, I was struggling to create a pedagogy that addressed social class issues. It was an exciting time, charting unknown territory. With “new” working-class studies, it continues to be both challenging and invigorating. This paper presents a brief retrospective of my teaching of social class in my developmental writing and freshman writing courses. Then, I describe a recent semester with my English 101 course. After a few weeks of reading essays, writing brief pieces, and engaging in class discussions, students compose an essay about “Work and Social Class Identity.” For the essay assignment, I ask students to describe their view of class structure in American society, to provide personal work experiences that exemplify their concepts and to describe their social class identity. I encourage students to express themselves in their own language, create their own imagery, and develop their own theories that do not rely on the standard pyramid image, or even terms such as “upper class” or “middle class.” I hope to get their own views of our society’s class distinctions. While in the past I’ve always been impressed with the sophistication of my students’ sense of class differences, I’ve recently noticed their lack of access to the actual vocabulary necessary to understanding social class and how it functions in our society. At other times, students confused terms, concepts and ideas. The writing I would have been happy with ten years ago now missed the mark. But, with extensive revision, students’ papers that were filled with clichés, confusion, and simplistic conclusions turned into fascinating explorations into social class and a profound understanding of it in their lives. Phil Picha, Independent Scholar, philp@mit.midco.net Lean Manufacturing: The Highest Stage of Capitalism? Lean manufacturing models utilize continuous process improvement to eliminate waste (muda) in the production process. Macro (formative) and micro (substantive) analyses of an ideal type Japanese Production System (JPS) transplant factory provide useful insights for understanding the economic success attributed to lean manufacturing techniques. The exploitative aspects of the JPS model are explored within the context of hegemonic control devices experienced on the shop floor. An assessment of dilemmas facing the lean model is presented for consideration concerning future prospects for the paradigm. Peter Rachleff, Macalester College, rachleff@macalester.edu Using Theater and Music to Connect College Students and Workers How can those of us who teach in contemporary colleges connect our students, many of whom are from “middle-class” backgrounds or are being socialized/trained/educated to enter “middle-class” professions, with workers, whether blue collar, white collar, or service sector, and their organizations? In my presentation as part of the panel “Promoting Working Class Studies in the U.S. and the U.K.,” I want to discuss one recent project of mine and tease out what we might learn from it that is of wider applicability. In the spring of 2004, a colleague from our Music Department and I designed and team-taught a new course, “Telling Labor’s Story Through Music.” We used readings, music, guest presenters, and collaboration with United Auto Workers Union Local 879 (Ford Truck Assembly, St. Paul) and its members, not only to immerse our students in labor history and the elements of working class culture that have found expression through music, but also to stage, at the college and at the UAW’s union hall, Steve Jones’ newly written jazz opera, “Forgotten: Murder at the Ford Rouge, 1937.” The course provided a cast for the musical, and rehearsals, residencies and workshops with Steve Jones himself and labor folksinger Bucky Halker, a union-led tour of the Ford plant, a class presentation by local union president Rob McKenzie, and discussions at the hall with rank-and-file union members about their lives and work, added to course readings, class discussions, listening assignments, and essay papers, to create a very effective learning experience for the students – as well as a learning opportunity for the auto workers who met with the students and/or attended the musical. Scott E. Randolph, Purdue University, srandolp@purdue.edu Pain, Injury and Loss: 1930s Railway Claim Records and the Meaning of Work How did industrial workers question their investment in the putative rewards and punishments of capitalism when the short and long-term retention or acquisition of employment no longer seemed secure? Given the pervasiveness of unemployment and its apparent intractability, did other segments of society, such as those with relatively secure employment or landowners question their commitment to capitalism, or its corporate manifestations? Did the Great Depression alter or transform cultural attitudes toward power and its application, outside the rubric of conservative – liberal debates over the purpose of government and the threat/benefit of monopoly? In order to propose some tentative answers to these questions I have interrogated a sample of the Erie Railroad’s Kent (OH) Division Claim Agent files from 1933 – 1941. These records are significant because they include individuals from different and often antagonistic classes all of whom are interacting with the same industrial institution. The records reveal some individuals, especially transients, whose interactions with the railroad are suffused with an awareness of the disparity between the company's power and their own. Thus, they articulated their frustration and powerlessness in claims ("attacks') against the railroad. Alternatively, their claims against the railroad might represent "lottery tickets" or picket signs against oppression. That older enmities toward the railroad industry still have meanings is evident in the claims of landowners. We also see glimpses of middle-class insecurities about the social and cultural transformations of the New Deal and the fundamental alteration of the symbiotic but perpetually uneasy relationships between the (at times) latent working class and the middle-class. Cherie Rankin, Illinois State University, clranki@ilstu.edu Religion and the Working Class in Proletarian Fiction and Film In Grace Lumpkin’s proletarian novel To Make My Bread, the dichotomy between religion as a source of comfort and a source of oppression is central to the struggle of the Gastonia textile mill workers. On one hand, organized religion provides an emotional release for overtaxed workers and provided a close-knit community center; on the other, many worker churches are staffed by clergy who receive their paychecks from local mill owners, and the pulpit often becomes mouthpiece for mill management (a relationship established clearly in works such as Liston Pope’s Millhands and Preachers). John Sayles’ film Matewan presents the church as a place of solace for abused, marginalized coal miners, but also as the wellspring of their activism; the pulpit becomes not only the source of God’s word, but also becomes the podium from which worker resistance and revolt can put forth a voice and be heard. Finally, Pietro diDonato’s Christ in Concrete explores the tensions between Christianity as the hope of tortured immigrant workers (and their families) and the reality of their lives, which ring again and again as unfair; that is, Christ as the giver of mercy and blessing stands out as a stark anomaly in lives full of physical and emotional pain as well as endless injustice. The characters in these works, caught between the reality of their daily lives and the promise of a much happier (but far-off) hereafter, take different directions in response, but most turn toward activism and socialism and away from religion to some degree, some completely (as is the case of Paul in Christ in Concrete). In much the same way as Lumpkin did in her own life (going from fundamental Christianity to Communism and back again), these characters struggle with opposed systems of belief and how to reconcile the two in their lives. Wendell Ricketts, Independent Scholar, wendell@mondowendell.com Rick Laurent Feely, Independent Scholar, warrantsoutstanding@yahoo.com Rigoberto González, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, rigoberto70@aol.com Book Presentation—Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction about Working-Class Life by More-or-Less Gay Men (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2005) In this age of Will & Grace and gentrification, the “dream market” and gay investment advisors, not much is heard from working-class queer men. But the eighteen contributors to Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction about Working-Class Life by More-or-Less Gay Men set out to change that. Work on the Everything I Have Is Blue anthology, the first collection of fiction (indeed, of any kind of writing) devoted to the experiences of more-or-less gay-identified, working-class men, began in 1998. The manuscript was rejected by fifty-seven publishers before being accepted in 2003. In this session, the editor, along with two of the book’s contributors, will present the book; read some of their work; and discuss the history of the Everything I Have Is Blue project, the issue of fictionalizing working-class and queer experiences, and the intersections of (homo)sexuality and class in literature. A study guide/readers’ guide will be presented along with suggestions for using Blue in working-class studies and LGBTQ studies courses. The American and international writers collected in Everything I Have Is Blue include a professional trucker, a Texas prisoner, a librarian, a poet, several activists, a retired English professor, and a street mime, to name a few, and their contributions showcase a literature of depth and complexity that brings much-needed color to the palate of queer and working-class cultural and literary identity. Richard Robeson, UNC-CH School of Medicine, rich.robe@verizon.net Performable Case Studies: Readers’ Theater at the Intersection of Art, Ethics, Pedagogy and Outreach This workshop will introduce to a wider audience work based in different schools of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), which make use of readers’ theater as an instrument of outreach and education. Three different models for the use of readers’ theater will be presented, based on (1) community outreach from within the UNC-CH School of Medicine; (2) pedagogical strategies in bioethics education in the School of Medicine’s Second-Year Humanities and Social Sciences curriculum; and (3) community outreach, education, activism and research ethics in environmental justice (EJ) issues from within the UNC-CH School of Public Health. At the nexus of all three models is a set of principles that appeal to the goal of creativity that seeks to offer engagement with, rather than disengagement from, the world at large: (1) careful attention to the difference between art and propaganda; (2) dramatic art as particularly well-suited to the exploration of ethical issues; (3) the ethical issues that obtain during the telling or reconstruction of a story (case), especially when the main themes involve abuses of trust or power. After opening remarks during which the history of this work (1988-present) is established (e.g. topics addressed, research methods, pedagogical imperatives in a professional school environment, creating original works from research data) examples from each of the three models will be performed, it is hoped, by session members. Post-reading discussion will emphasize the broader application of readers’ theater to CWCS Conference themes. Becky Rosenberg, University of Washington/Bothell, brosenberg@uwb.edu Education and the American Dream: A Course on Schooling and Social Mobility What are the limits and possibilities of schooling for generating opportunity for poor and working class students? What can the study of institution of schooling teach students about impediments to social mobility, even in times of deep popular belief in the power of education to transform lives? How might we enable students from poor and working class backgrounds to interpret their own educational experiences as “the exceptions” who succeeded in college while siblings and peers may have been left behind? We have attempted to address these (and other) questions in a course entitled “Education and the American Dream”. In this paper, we will describe our work in developing and refining the course, particularly as we have introduced a culminating assignment in which students write a narrative that locates their own schooling within social class analyses. This course is offered at a campus created to serve place-bound and time-bound students and is affiliated with a major research university; consequently, many of the campus’ students are first-generation college students and many are returning adults experiencing their first successes in formal education. While the campus faculty hold an explicit commitment to diversity across the curriculum, few other courses on the campus foreground social class as an analytical lens. The course is taught by a faculty member in Education (Jane Van Galen), with the collaboration of the Director of the campus Writing Center (Becky Rosenberg), and is open to K-12 and community college teachers, seniors from all campus majors, and post-baccalaureate teacher education students. Through film, literature, poetry, popular music, autobiography, sociological theory, and empirical examinations of schooling, we draw students into examination of the ideologies of educational meritocracy from multiple perspectives. We consider the personal, intellectual, social, and economic dimensions of class mobility, as we generate critique of the ground rules of success in school. We end the class with students reading their own narratives of education. Students from poor and working-class backgrounds often tell their stories of schooling for the first time, after years of “passing” as effortlessly successful students. They speak of the ways that they have come to understand the role of class in their educational aspirations and achievements, and of the tangled ways in which schools have worked both for and against their interests. The presentation will include course materials and perspectives from students who have taken the course over the past several years. Elizabeth Rudd, University of Washington/Seattle, eebet@seanet.com "Idontwannawork Manufacturing Co.": Defining the FMLA for Human Resources Professionals In the last few decades, human resources specialists have transformed from personnel secretaries into professionals actively seeking recognition for themselves as experts in "strategic partnership" with management.  In doing so, they are adopting a particular role in the relationships between capital, labor, and the state.  In this paper, I argue that as HR professionals grapple with implementation of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA), they also help construct intersections of gender and class.  I was a participant observer in two FMLA trainings designed for HR professionals and in workshops and trainings relevant to FMLA at two meetings of a state-wide Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM). Although FMLA was specifically designed to help disrupt conventional gender roles in families, the discussions of FMLA that I observed tend to portray working-class men as the villains, employers as the victims, and gender and family issues as largely irrelevant. Marie Gina Sandy, Ph.D. Claremont Graduate University, marie.sandy@cgu.edu Engaging Conversations: The Ontario, California Grassroots Thinktank This paper describes the structure and outcomes of a community-based “grassroots thinktank” located in Ontario, California that is based on the premise that people in neighborhoods can collectively engage in deliberative dialogues to determine research and outreach projects while cultivating skills of democracy and building social capital. Blending some salient features of both Jane Addams’ Hull House and Saul Alinksy-style organizing, the Ontario Community University Partnership provides an innovative space that integrates “local” and “expert” knowledge where community members, city, faith-based and non-profit organizations, faculty and students work together to develop and implement activities that support the regeneration of community life while enhancing the quality of life for residents. The driving force of the thinktank are the residents of the low and moderate income communities of Ontario, with the contributions of the university partners playing a supportive role. Some thinktank projects have led to more engaged political activism and advocacy, while others have not, but all have led to a greater participation in community life. The author utilizes a conversational or hermeneutic approach to participating in community-based work that is also grounded in a sense of place; this approach provides an ethical lens that values friendship, solidarity, love, self-understanding, the ongoing cultivation of practical wisdom, and a sense that understanding always involves our participation. The author contends that her participation in the think tank has also made her a better scholar and better able to perform in traditional academic settings. She hopes this work may provide food for thought for others considering ways of respectfully engaging in community work by cultivating their own engaging conversations. Seth Sazant, Carleton University, ssazant@connect.carleton.ca Greedy Goons: Labour, Hegemony, and Fan Reactions to the NHL Lockout In September, 2004, the National Hockey League (NHL) locked out its players. This has provoked a strong collective reaction from Canadians and has received much coverage in the media – far more than any other labour dispute in recent history. The issue has brought relations of production in professional hockey to the fore – relations which are often obscured in popular discussions of the sport. This paper will examine fan reactions to the lockout, analyzing the political economic discourses in which they are embedded. Sport has long played a significant role in accommodating the working class to bourgeois hegemony. In John Hargreaves’ seminal book Sport, Power and Culture, he discusses how the ruling classes used sport to both fragment subordinate classes and to reconstitute alternative, oppositional identities that are unrelated to class. Considering the Canadian case, where hockey is central to the production of a unified national identity, the NHL lockout provides an interesting lens through which one can examine conceptions of labour reorganization. Fan reactions have tended to call attention to how the labour dispute is sullying the game’s purity and innocence or to player avarice. In my paper, I will show how reactions comply with the hegemonic narratives of capitalism and consumerism while simultaneously demonstrating a desire for resistance. This will be argued through two related points. First, these reactions demonstrate an imputed separation of sport from the capitalist society in which the sport is embedded. Second, the lament that hockey has succumbed to the principles of capitalist social relations shows a desire for entertainment that is beyond the reach of commodification. These insights, however, are contradicted by professional hockey’s development and continued operation in the context of capitalist social relations. Andrea Sciacca, SUNY – Empire State: Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies, asciacca@si.rr.com Still Talking Trash: Sweeping Up and Moving On In my years as a Building Superintendent in the heart of New York’s East Village, I was often forced to grapple with my own notions of class identity. Was I a Super going to graduate school? Or an Adjunct moonlighting in the building services trade? Perhaps a graduate student with a secret life – a sort of Super-Hero of unlikely origins; a code-breaker with access to different classes, destined to bring them together through healing – revolution – or both… As I saw myself defined through other eyes, I wondered more frequently why it mattered so much which identity was primary? Why did I need to justify this class contradiction to myself or anyone else? Why were others with whom I came in contact so quick to remind me of my lower class place, whenever it suited their need to assume a position of dominance? What was so threatening about a female graduate student sweeping the stairs, painting the walls, or taking out the trash? The answer, it seemed, was everything. This experience led me down a road I had not planned to travel. I found myself serving as advocate, outsider, and conspirator. At times, I was larger than life – at times I was nothing short of invisible. On a daily basis, I encountered issues of expectation and performance with respect to race, class, and gender identities. I witnessed a structure that thrives on compartmentalization devolve into a web of fear and rage. I saw the promise of real change – but also the defeat of a lonely victory – feeling first-hand what it means to win the battle, but not the war. I spent four years in New York City’s dirty trenches, armed with a tool-box and a lap-top, and I lived to tell the tale… Jonathan W. Senchyne, Syracuse University, jwsenchy@syr.edu Crime Fiction and Commodity Fetishism In a discussion of the confluence of working-class readers and crime fiction I hope to ask a set of questions that will bring genre study and materialist critique together over the subject, rather than to advance a finished claim on it. Such is the value of conferring in my assessment.1 I will use the popular television series CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) as a point of departure to discuss Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism. My inquiry begins by noting that in forensic dramas, such as CSI, the dead body always retains a trace of the event that produced it (the murder). These dramas assert that the trace exists, and that it always allows the detective to reconstruct the conditions of production (exactly how, when, where, and by whom the murder was committed). For me, in the economy of Production (Murder) to Commodity (Body) to Consumer (Detective) and finally to justice (in both cases), there exists a fundamental problem in Marxist terms. That is, to Marx, the commodity does not retain the trace of its production; rather, it always obscures them. The question then becomes, does the forensic drama present a model of the commodity that elides an understanding of worker-produced commodities? In this case these dramas metonymically reinforce capitalist ideology. Or, on the other hand, do these narratives represent the detective as a Marxist critic, immune to commodity fetishism, and therefore able to recreate the conditions of production, disseminate them to the public, and, finally, arrive at justice?  The verb “to confer” from which we draw the noun “conference” has two basic uses. Used as a transitive verb it means, “to bestow,” and used as an intransitive verb it means, “to consult.” I have been to many conferences where papers were given to bestow one’s knowledge upon others, yet I imagine a more thoughtful model of scholarship where the constitutive act of conferring takes the form of consultation with others. In this, I think, lies the promise of Working-Class Studies as an organized body of scholars in conversation with one another. Alessandra Senzani, Florida Atlantic University, asenzani@fau.edu “What's the Worst that can Happen? So the Tornado picks up our House and Slams it down in a better Neighborhood”: Humor and the Working Class in American Television Comedies This paper sets out to sketch a chart of the connections between humor and class in American television comedies. From The Honeymooners in the 50s and All in the Family in the 70s to contemporary series, sitcoms about working-class families have exploited humor to appeal both to the middle class and the working class. Indeed, the first is given the opportunity to enjoy its ‘superiority’ and laugh at popular tastes and lifestyle, while the latter can finally identify with the characters on screen and laugh with them at issues to which they can relate. While the US television industry tends to erase class differences and tensions, at specific historical conjunctions sitcoms on the working class emerge and try to mediate conflicts that have become visible in the larger society. This paper will focus specifically on the late 80s and 90s representations of the working class in two American sitcoms, namely Roseanne and Married with Children. The aim of this study is to investigate the tensions between hegemonic and oppositional meanings attached to gender and social class in the abovementioned sitcoms and hypothesize how humor plugs into these discourses and mediates the tensions between them. It will be shown that humor can function both as a containment strategy of oppositional discourses and as a subversive force able to deconstruct hegemonic discourses. The question addressed will thus be how effective subversive humor can be within television institutionalized discourses. The comparison between the two sitcoms will show that there is a limited space for agency and resistant meanings within television programs that contribute to create a validating and challenging representation of the working class. The ambivalence and tension between hegemonic and oppositional discourses is an intrinsic characteristic of the television industry and its need to reach a ‘mass-audience.’ Humor constitutes one of the means to create such an ambivalent space for different decodings of the television message. Indeed, it relieves the anxiety and, to a certain extent, it minimizes the conflict. On the other hand, humor can also be a means to make a conflict visible. By being ambiguous and retractable, humor can bring out the contradictions between different hegemonic discourses from within, and thus question naturalized constructs such as gender and social class. As feminist theorists have long taught us, rather than appropriating and inverting the dominant discourse, we need to recontextualize and displace it through parody and masquerade, in order to unveil its ‘non-naturalness.’ In my view, this property of humorous discourse makes it a privileged device to introduce resistant meanings and points of view into institutional discourses and thus also into TV programs. Timothy Sheard, Nurse Epidemiologist at SUNY/Downstate Medical Center, Independent Scholar/Author, timsheard@optonline.net The Private Eye as Transcendent Working-Class Hero In this paper I analyze the figure of the classic private eye from the popular hard-boiled detective novels of the 1930's and 1940's. While the engaging story line and the protagonist’s heroic qualities are the heart of the detective story, I contend that this uniquely American genre has a special symbolic appeal for its blue collar readers: that of the transcendent working class hero. Working class readers love the classic private eye narrative precisely because its main character escapes the limits of his class but always returns to it, proud and free, if beat up and broke. Many working class readers dream of escaping their class limitations because life in the working class is fraught with uncertainties and dangers. Rent comes due, the boss can fire you at any time, and the pension fund could disappear in a puff of corrupt investment smoke. In a class society, the ruling class artfully plays on these insecurities by weaving dreams of escape throughout popular culture. The private eye, however, doesn’t need to rely on luck or fate to escape the limitations of his class because he is by profession able to transcend those limits. Unlike most working class people, he is just as much at home with a rich, cheating banker or a bejeweled heiress as he is with an auto mechanic or the local newsboy. Corrupt politicians can't buy him; beautiful femme fatales can't seduce him, though he may dally for a time in their company. In the end, however, he always returns to his humble office and his low rent bungalow, a choice that I argue functions as a critique of the Cinderella-like dreams of escape from the working class. This character’s unique appeal comes from his honor and desire to remain rooted in the working class, in spite of being able to move beyond its social limitations. First I discuss how my own reading habits led me to this genre, and then how my experience as a nurse and union activist led me to write hard-boiled detective fiction with a hospital custodian/union shop steward as the private eye. Finally, I will contextualize the appeal of the hard-boiled private eye in terms of writing and publishing working class stories in general. Paul Sissons, University College London, p.sissons@ucl.ac.uk Labour Market Change in Deindustrialized Areas: A Comparison of the UK and the US The focus of the presentation is the experience of deindustrialization in the Northeast of England and in Southwestern Pennsylvania since the 1980s. From the beginning of the 1980s some 10,000 coalmining jobs were lost in Northumberland, Northeast England (Beatty et al, 2005). In the 1980s the four biggest steel mills in the Monongahela Valley in Southwestern Pennsylvania shed some 20,000 workers (Pennsylvania Industrial Directory, 1980; 1990). These job losses in basic industries created huge ‘job shortfalls’, transforming local labour markets and local communities, and altering the economic, social and cultural landscapes. This presentation examines the different ways that communities have responded to this industrial decline in the UK and the US, focusing specifically on labour market adjustments. Several types of adjustment can occur in a labour market in response to demand side changes (job creation and destruction). These include changes in the levels of net out-commuting, net out-migration, unemployment and economic inactivity (withdrawal from the labour market). The presentation estimates the scales of these adjustments in Northumberland and the Monongahela Valley over a twenty year period, to illustrate the differing responses to deindustrialization between the US and the UK. It then outlines some of the questions raised by the differences, and how they will be addressed in my future research. Tim Strangleman, Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University t.strangleman@londonmet.ac.uk New Working-Class Studies in the USA and UK – Past, Present, and Future Despite the long standing tradition of class analysis in the UK there has seemingly been a slowness to respond to some of the innovative approaches to the area that have coalesced around the Centre for Working-Class Studies conferences at Youngstown State University over the last decade, as well as latterly at Stony Brook SUNY. This paper is a reflection on the field of working class studies from the perspective of the UK. It will seek to understand the differences between the two countries’ tradition of discussion of class and serve to highlight some of the innovative work in the field in the UK. The paper will suggest that while Working class studies was ‘born in the USA’ the approach it offers has been reflected in the work of many historians and sociologists in the UK over several decades. It is argued that this is a tradition that should be drawn on in the future. John Paul Tassoni, Miami University Middletown, tassonjp@muohio.edu Retelling Class at a Public Ivy and a Regional Campus: A Case Study in Basic Writing A case study of basic writing at Miami University, my presentation shows how concerns for working-class students manifested in the construction of a one-credit writing lab, English 001, which “at-risk” students, marked by disadvantaged educational backgrounds, would take concurrently with their mainstream writing courses. Although the English Department required concurrent enrollment in the first-year writing sequence so as to avoid “ghettoizing” disadvantaged students, within fifteen years of its first being offered, the course and the interests it was designed to address had been siphoned off from the English Department of the school’s public ivy main campus to the Offices of Learning Assistance on the school’s open-enrollment, regional campuses. A focus on class highlights the attitudes, beliefs, and practices at the main campus that generated this siphoning as well as those at the regional campus that helped sustain it. This focus also shows the ways social class plays out differently on the two different campuses: the ways elitist attitudes distance compositionists on the main campus from basic writing concerns, and thus, the working-class students with whom it has been associated; and the ways iconic discourse constructs those who work on behalf of basic writers on the regional campuses as working-class heroes, whose willingness to labor for sub-standard pay and little professional esteem often sets them in antagonist relations to compositionists who do want to lend their expertise to the basic writing enterprise. Carole Anne Taylor, Bates College, ctaylor@bates.edu Depoliticized Class/rooms and the Moral Equivalence of War: Taking the Heat (or not) An analogy between two supposed freedoms, the freedom of the press and academic freedom, suggests that how both have fared “in time of war” affects all teachers, notwithstanding the inequitable pressures on junior and adjunct faculty. Rather than viewing particular infringements as departures from prior, established freedoms, I analyze institutional and intellectual practices that go well beyond the fraudulently objective stance so well described by Howard Zinn and others. Now, even once-frequent allusions to William James’s call for “the moral equivalent of war” in “something that would be as heroic as war,” clear in its anti-war focus despite its moral elevation of war, have given way to a proudly tautological use of the phrase: nothing presents itself so “heroic as war” as new war. When even anti-war sentiment becomes a validation for an evasive moral equivalence, what insights might we share about when and how to undertake the engaged, principled risks that have actual moral resonance? Academic institutions living under the Patriot Act build upon a long history of promoting pedagogical self-censorship that in many ways resembles the self-censorship of the press, replete with evasive practices that stand in for moral accountability, and, in so doing, support the primacy of civility, collegiality, propriety, and other middle-class virtues that all too habitually become intellectual criteria as well. Most teaching, after all, occurs within institutions that tout good teachers as those who listen and support, who provide “balanced” perspectives, and who evaluate students on the basis of a knowledge base free of “ideology.” In such an atmosphere, teachers fear making students angry more than they fear even appalling educational ellipses; they fear the well-publicized images of classrooms as a place where teachers may rant at will and student-victims must submit or suffer evaluative retaliation. This generalized fear of not just overt public attack, but of an image repertoire that marks one as more “ideological,” “argumentative,” “opinionated,” or “strident” than one’s colleagues, makes many of us defensive, self-protective. As provocation to strengthening “the shared energy of shared labor,” I describe the highs and lows of courses that attempt to make the cultural baggage that readers bring to texts part of their subject matter. In classes that read Carolyn Chute, Jim Daniels, Carol Tarlen, and Janet Zandy (among others familiar to Youngstown conferences) alongside Greg Sarris, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros, Martín Espada, June Jordan, and John Wideman, students must at least confront their own assumptions about the depoliticized nature of class/rooms and their own moral values and personal aspirations. Finally, in hopes of feedback and the collective wisdom, I suggest a couple of hypotheses about when and why teachers should choose to take the heat, even in a world of patly assertive moral equivalences that frequently disallow choice at all. Michelle M. Tokarczyk, Goucher College, mtokarcz@goucher.edu Not in Limbo: American Working-Class Women and the Search for Home Scholars of working-class literature have noted that one of the most pervasive themes in American working-class women’s writing is the idea of home. Janet Zandy identifies home as not only a physical space, but also an idea, a sense of community where the feeling of otherness ends, “an inner geography where the ache to belong finally quits” (Calling Home 1). My critical study of Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison has led me to build upon and complicate Zandy’s definition. Home is not a simple comforting construct. For working-class women, home is a place of origin, a place where they are comfortable. Simultaneously, it is a place that disappoints and constrains, one from which many feel they must escape. Yet completely rejecting one’s origins can exact a high price. In the words of Alfred Lubrano, it can leave one in Limbo, caught between a middle and working-class world without feeling at home in either. Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison have all struggled to reconcile their working-class backgrounds with their more privileged current status. They do so partially by making peace with their working-class communities and partially by forming new communities that will mirror the wished-for support of home and family. Most importantly, these writers create a home, a safe space, through and in their writing. My paper will explore the particular issues of home in each writer’s life and art and show how she resolves these issues through her writing as well as, sometimes, in her life. Marcy Tucker, University of Central Arkansas, mtucker@uca.edu From Working-Class Student to Middle-Class Professor: Navigating a Rite of Passage in the Job Search Among the many challenges that working-class academics face, the job search is perhaps one of the most neglected in our profession’s scholarship. In many ways, the job search best exemplifies the dilemma so commonly articulated by working-class academics: We reside in a world in-between the culture of our upbringing and the middle-class culture of academia. Once a student nears the end of graduate studies, securing a job in the academy serves as a rite of passage, yet the experience is fraught with contradictions and inequities, especially for members of the working class who lack the “cultural capital” necessary in navigating the job market. This presentation focuses on many of the problematic practices associated with the academic job search and how communities of working-class scholars might face unique challenges that our middle-class peers do not as we enter this phase of professionalization. It is informed by my own recent (2004) experiences in the job search and how I struggled with a flawed system of hiring that renders many candidates like me often feeling powerless and vulnerable, confused and demoralized. I learned, as some of my colleagues did, that the conventions of academic hiring are often different in significant ways from job seeking “in the real world.” This presentation addresses issues of self-representation, social expectations, networking, interview sites and interview practices, search committee failures, family pressures, and the expectations and mentoring of our degree-granting programs. Jane Van Galen, University of Washington/Bothell, jvangalen@uwb.edu Education and the American Dream: A Course on Schooling and Social Mobility What are the limits and possibilities of schooling for generating opportunity for poor and working class students? What can the study of institution of schooling teach students about impediments to social mobility, even in times of deep popular belief in the power of education to transform lives? How might we enable students from poor and working class backgrounds to interpret their own educational experiences as “the exceptions” who succeeded in college while siblings and peers may have been left behind? We have attempted to address these (and other) questions in a course entitled “Education and the American Dream”. In this paper, we will describe our work in developing and refining the course, particularly as we have introduced a culminating assignment in which students write a narrative that locates their own schooling within social class analyses. This course is offered at a campus created to serve place-bound and time-bound students and is affiliated with a major research university; consequently, many of the campus’ students are first-generation college students and many are returning adults experiencing their first successes in formal education. While the campus faculty hold an explicit commitment to diversity across the curriculum, few other courses on the campus foreground social class as an analytical lens. The course is taught by a faculty member in Education (Jane Van Galen), with the collaboration of the Director of the campus Writing Center (Becky Rosenberg), and is open to K-12 and community college teachers, seniors from all campus majors, and post-baccalaureate teacher education students. Through film, literature, poetry, popular music, autobiography, sociological theory, and empirical examinations of schooling, we draw students into examination of the ideologies of educational meritocracy from multiple perspectives. We consider the personal, intellectual, social, and economic dimensions of class mobility, as we generate critique of the ground rules of success in school. We end the class with students reading their own narratives of education. Students from poor and working-class backgrounds often tell their stories of schooling for the first time, after years of “passing” as effortlessly successful students. They speak of the ways that they have come to understand the role of class in their educational aspirations and achievements, and of the tangled ways in which schools have worked both for and against their interests. The presentation will include course materials and perspectives from students who have taken the course over the past several years. Robin Veder, Penn State Harrisburg, rmv10@psu.edu The Making of an Icon: Weaver-Florists and the Representation of English Working-Class Docility and Independence This paper takes up the iconic status of the nineteenth-century weaver-florist, romanticized and memorialized as a metonym for both lost artisanal independence and lost docility of English textile workers in the early 1800s. In this paper, I present a brief social history of Spitalfields and Manchester weavers who were also florists, with an explanation of how these two occupations were mutually functional during the pre- and early industrial periods. Workshop architecture, work schedules, and the production of flowered silks were some of the reinforcing characteristics for these two occupations. Then, using Stuart Hall’s theory of representation as the production of shared meanings, I investigate the circulation and purposes of stories about such weavers. Since the early nineteenth century, social commentators and social historians have circulated stories valorizing weaver-florists. Some, such as Edward Church (Report from Assistant Hand-Loom Weavers’ Commissioners, 1835-1839) praised the weaver-florists of Spitalfields for their docility. Others, like Edmond Holmes (Freedom and Growth, 1923) took weavers’ floristry as proof of intelligence and independence. The flexibility and persistence of this working-class icon makes it a valuable representation for understanding the evolution of working-class studies in the long nineteenth-century. This new video on race and class is part of a rich history of Black American documentaries and African stories. This longstanding tradition, which also intersects with literature throughout the diaspora, summons the work Ghanaian TV director Bill Marshall, African-American documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson, Burkino Faso’s Daniel Kollo Sanou, and the “father of African cinema,” Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese director of “Moulaude,” which also probes female genital mutilation as well as other aspects of everyday African village life. “Wassup” touches on taboo subjects resurrected by women writers like American-born Alice Walker and Kenyan-born Leah Muya. While “Wassup’s” lyrical language is Creative Nonfiction, one also hears the lilting oral poetry of the Enanga epic tradition of the Bahaya of Tanzania, the Maasai of Kenya and the hip-hop lingo from brothers and sisters from the South Side of Chicago. Kathleen A. Welsch, Clarion University of Pennsylvania, kwelsch@clarion.edu Writing Memoirs: Connecting the Lives and Lessons of Working-Class Parents to Academic Children This presentation offers participants both a reading and an opportunity for writing and discussing memoir as a means of making connections between academics and the lives of their working-class parents. The first half of the session offers a collective reading from memoirs by academic women in which they examine the influence of higher education on their relationship with working-class parents, as well as the influence the lessons and language of home have had on their academic lives. (Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and Their Working-Class Parents – University Press of America, December 2004.) Each presenter will read an excerpt from her memoir, which explores the relationship between academic daughter and working-class parent, the value and power of bringing the lessons and language of working-class parents into the academy, the ambivalence associated with a parent’s sacrifice for the success of the academic child; the balancing act of straddling the worlds of academia and home. In the second half of the session, the readers will lead the audience in an introductory memoir-writing exercise, to be followed by a read aloud session and discussion of the value of memoir as a means of addressing class issues. Stan West, Columbia College Chicago, stanwest1@msn.com A Snapshot into Working-Class African-American and African Films Voices of Kamba craftsmen, Kikuyu women workers, and Enanga waiters are the first sounds we hear as East Africans greet African-American educators, writers and other workers with the slang salutation “wassup” in a new documentary “Wassup East Africa.” In this 50-minute digital documentary shot on a consumer model Sony camera and edited on a two-year-old laptop, “Wassup East Africa” asks the rhetorical question, “Can any of us who are four generations or more away from the old country really go back home?” The answers from both African Americans and East Africans may surprise you. Through the lens of working-class and middle-class Blacks from America, Kenya and Tanzania, this universal theme is filtered through a seemingly African-centered prism. Too often, “universality” is only explored from a Eurocentric, ruling-class perspective. “Wassup East Africa” is different. With colorful shots of Maasai, East Africa’s most traditional group, and in-your-face interviews with New Age Negroes from Chicago, the viewer is forced to juxtapose those seemingly different social positions, with some perhaps noticing obvious differences and others maybe inferring that there are more things in common than in conflict. Cultural imperialism is noticeably absent. Issues of Arab slavery, European colonialism, American consumerism, East African female genital mutilation, Rwandan and Sudanese refugees, the oft-romantic notions of Black Americans about the so-called “Motherland,” draconian U.S.-government-imposed travel advisories, and whether or not Africans even want Black Americans to come back home are just a few of the hot button issues explored by zany documentarians Stan West, a middle-aged author-journalist-educator-activist and Yves Hughes Jr., a 22-year-old recent art school graduate. After holding focus groups with Black filmmakers and White Mormons at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, West and Hughes premiered “Wassup” in Oak Park, a tony, tolerant, suburb west of Chicago, and now Youngstown State University’s “Working-Class Studies” Conference. This new video on race and class is part of a rich history of Black American documentaries and African stories. This longstanding tradition, which also intersects with film and literature throughout the diaspora, summons the work Ghanaian TV director Bill Marshall, African-American documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson, Burkino Faso’s Daniel Kollo Sanou, and the “father of African cinema,” Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese director of “Moulaude,” which also probes female genital mutilation as well as other aspects of everyday African village life. “Wassup” touches on taboo subjects resurrected by women writers like American-born Alice Walker and Kenyan-born Leah Muya. While “Wassup’s” lyrical language is Creative Nonfiction, one also hears the lilting oral poetry of the Enanga epic tradition of the Bahaya of Tanzania, the Maasai of Kenya and the hip-hop lingo from brothers and sisters from the South Side of Chicago. Edward N. Wolff, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and New York University, Edward.wolff@nyu.edu, and Ajit Zacharias, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, zacharia@levy.org Class and Household Economic Well-Being in the United States, 1989-2002 The official measure of economic well-being in the U.S. is pre-tax money income which leaves out crucial determinants of living standards. Utilizing the information base constructed for the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW), we analyze the economic well-being of households differentiated by their class status. The LIMEW includes, in addition to labor income, income from wealth, net government expenditures (government expenditures incurred on behalf of households less taxes paid), and value of unpaid domestic labor. Such a measure allows us to analyze labor market outcomes in conjunction with workers' accumulation of assets (or debt), effects of government policies with respect to spending and taxation, and changing demands placed on working adults by childcare and housework. We deploy two taxonomies of class in our analyses. The first is based on a distinction between “capitalist households” and “non-capitalist households” while the second is a class-location schema for “employee households.” Our main interest is to distinguish between those in authority positions and those in subservient positions. However, we also identify “cross-class households”. With the class schema and well-being measure we have developed, we examine (a) disparities in well-being among households differentiated by class location, and other key demographic characteristics; (b) overall economic inequality as shaped by intra- and inter-class inequalities; and, (c) the role of government expenditures and taxation in reducing intra-class and inter-class disparities. John L. Woods, Purdue University, jlwoods@purdue.edu High Stakes and Last Stands: Global Unionism and the 1976 Rubber Industry Strike The labor struggle between the United Rubber, Cork, Linoleum, and Plastic Workers and the Big Four rubber producing companies catapulted Akron, Ohio and the URW onto the world stage. The rubber industry strike of 1976 has been called “High Stakes,” “Long and Bitter,” “The Losing End,” and finally, the United Rubber Workers’ “Last Stand.” One important aspect of the strike that begs inquiry was the involvement of the International Federation of Chemical and General Workers Unions (ICF) based in Geneva, Switzerland. The ICF pledged its support of the URW through the use of boycotts, refusal of overtime, and other work actions. This paper will examine the effects of this support and attempt to place it within the larger context of the evolving structural, technological, and labor relations milieu of the mid-1970s. Jennifer L. Worley, Bowling Green State University, jworley@bgnet.bgsu.edu Keeping Community: Economics, Culture, Landscape, and Identity in a Deindustrialized Town America’s communities are exemplars of the changes that have permeated our society, particularly the dramatic social and technological changes of the second half of the 20th century. Nowhere is this change more apparent than in declining communities such as those found along the Ohio River in eastern Ohio and West Virginia and in the Monongahela Valley of western Pennsylvania. Building upon research that explores how economic decline affects communities and their residents, this paper focuses on the connections between local economies, working- class culture, landscape, and community identity. Specifically, I explore the ways in which residents of Martins Ferry, one community along the Ohio River, perceive their community’s identity in the aftermath of deindustrialization. Focusing on the community as a symbolic locale and landscape of meaning, I use a qualitative approach that combines intensive interviews with historical, demographic, and economic information about Martins Ferry. Three elements critical to how residents perceive and define their community are (1) the town’s economic past, present, and anticipated future; (2) the cultural life of the community, particularly its working-class character, strong church affiliations, and its reliance on the reputation of the town’s football team; and (3) the built environment, or physical features of the town. I present a model of community identity that takes into account these three crucial elements as well as the role of reputational entrepreneurs, those journalists and community leaders who regularly articulate the community’s identity to the public. Janet Zandy, Rochester Institute of Technology, jnzgsl@rit.edu Gendered Class and Laboring Bodies: Readings “What are two hands worth?” Janet Zandy reads excerpts from Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work (Rutgers 2004). This book links forms of cultural expression to labor, occupational injuries, and deaths. It centers what is usually decentered—the complex culture of working-class people—and reveals the flesh and bone beneath the abstractions of labor, class, and culture. “Factory hands. Field hands. Illegal hands. Redundant hands. The death of the hired hand. . . . Human beings reduced to working parts, just so many hands. . . .` Hands speak. In sign language they do the work of tongue and voice box. In greeting, they iterate multiple meanings. They augment orality. They reveal identity—the long fingers of the pianist, the rough, stubby hands of the bricklayer. The most advanced technology cannot completely eliminate the daily tasks performed by hands. Hands are reductive identifiers and lucid maps to the geogragraphy of human complexity.” Tom Zaniello, Northern Kentucky University, tzaniello@nku.edu The Wal-Martization of Labor Film In the last five years, the number of films devoted to globalization has escalated dramatically, but few subjects have generated as many specific films as Wal-Mart. It is now apparent, as a conference on Wal-Mart at Santa Barbara predicted in 2003, that Wal-Mart is the paradigmatic corporation of the 21st century, just as the Pennsylvania Railroad represents the 19th century, while General Motors epitomizes the first half of the 20th and Microsoft the second half. I will survey (and show clips from) a number of films of the last three years which attempt to take the measure of Wal-Mart’s impact on work in America and China (the source of almost 80-90% of Wal-Mart’s products), especially the company’s virulent anti-union policy, its depressed wage scale, its cut-throat competitiveness, and its domination of retail business in all the markets it penetrates. Virtually all the films suggest that Wal-Mart’s manipulation of issues of class are part of its success: it recruits from an enormous pool of needy workers (mostly women), it targets its sales pitch to workers and the working poor, and it dismisses the environmental and anti-sprawl activists as hopelessly middle class. Some of the films also concede the aspects of savvy business strategy that propelled Wal-Mart to the head of its class—its data analysis at the checkout counter, its product supply lines, its alliance with the Chinese business community, and its promotion of non-university trained managers.     65