The 2009 WCSA conference was hosted by the University of Pittsburgh, with a local planning committee led by Nick Coles and Charlie McCollister. The conference was attended by approximately 400 people, for some or all of the four days of events. About 60% of participants were full-time academics, educators, or organizers; 40% were students, part-time, or retired workers. People traveled to the conference from all around the US, and from Spain, England, Nigeria, Canada, Denmark, Colombia, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. Conference visitors were lodged in university housing, area hotels, and with local host families.
The conference program featured 78 concurrent sessions, on an extraordinary range of topics. We also mounted four evening cultural events, three plenary sessions, two art exhibits, and a banquet that included the WCSA awards ceremony. Three morning tours to historical sites in the Monongahela, Ohio, and Allegheny river valleys were fully subscribed and much appreciated.
The opening keynote event was a performance of The Point of Pittsburgh, a multimedia “people’s history” of the region written by conference co-chair Charles McCollester and performed by a cast drawn from local media, City Council, Pitt faculty and others. It played to a full house of 400 in the WPU Assembly Room, and drew positive mention in the press. Other evening events included a dramatic adaptation of Thomas Bell’s Out of This Furnace and a musical and pictorial presentation of Pittsburgh jazz history.
Plenary speakers included the “dean” of US labor historians, David Montgomery (Yale, emeritus) and union leaders Fred Redmond (USWA) and Bill Fletcher Jr. (AFGE). Participants’ evaluations indicated that the program well represented the diverse but related forms of work that make up the field of working-class studies: academic inquiry, pedagogy, activism, and artistic production.