Dolores Huerta Labor Institute
On March 6, 2010, Los Angeles labor scholars and community college faculty gathered together to develop curriculum ideas around labor, class, and social justice at the day-long Dolores Huerta Labor Institute’s 2nd Biennial Labor Scholars Retreat.
Discussing issues at the Labor Scholars Retreat
The Labor Scholars Retreat emerged from a desire to forge and nurture working relationships between scholars and Los Angeles community college instructors to bring Labor and Working-Class studies to the 130,000 students in the nine campus Los Angeles community college system. More than three dozen of the local leading scholars in the field such as Peter Dreier, Devra Weber, Goetz Wolff, Kent Wong, Karen Brodkin, Edna Bonacich, and Ruth Milkman participated in one or both retreats. The first retreat led to the development of a primer on teaching labor studies in the Los Angeles community college classroom
The featured speakers for this retreat included esteemed labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein (State of the Union: A Century of American Labor), labor activist Bill Fletcher (Solidarity Divided), urban theorist and historian Mike Davis (City of Quartz), and United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta. Nelson Lichtenstein’s talk on the history of labor education in the US can be found on the Dolores Huerta Labor Institute webpage.
The Dolores Huerta Labor Institute, founded in 2007, is the largest expansion of labor studies in the last 20 years and resulted from a partnership forged between the Los Angeles labor movement and the Los Angeles Community College District.
Our Daily Work/Our Daily Bread, Michigan State University
Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives has been one of the major sponsors of a year of programming on “Economic Justice” on the Michigan State University campus for the 2009-2010 school year. Activities held under both the ODW/ODL and Economic Justice banners included a fall semester exhibit, “Faces from An American Dream,” by photographer Martin Desht; a poetry reading by Mark Nowak from his new volume, COAL MOUNTAIN ELEMENTARY; a showing of Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning film “American Dream;” and the entire year’s line-up of ODW/ODL brown bags.
Martin Desht’s brown bag presentation in October was our 100th presentation since the start of the series in September of 1996. There are three music-filled brown bags in the 2009-2010 series include performer and folk icon Peggy Seeger on Women and Work in Anglo-American Traditional Songs, Charlie King and Karen Brandow presenting a musical portrait of labor anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti; and Don “Doop” Duprie and the Inside Outlaws exploring contemporary working class rock and roll in Detroit. The topical areas of the other brown bags in the series include among others the 1935 Detroit housewives strike, Wobbly visual culture and contemporary radical graphics, Jewish name-changing and class mobility, convict labor in Brazil, the Buffalo Historical Marionettes Project of the WPA, workers in post-Apartheid South Africa, and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. We are in the second year of special funding from the Dean of Social Science to support Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives programming.
Folklorist Yvonne Lockwood, co-founder and co-director of ODW/ODL, retired from the Michigan State University Museum and was replaced in the co-director role by Kurt Dewhurst, former director of the MSU Museum. As a cooperative project between the MSU Museum and the Labor Education Program of MSU’s School of Labor and Industrial Relations, Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives is co-directed by Dewhurst and Labor Education Program director John P. Beck.
Center for Study of Working Class Life, SUNY-Stony Brook
The Center announces the release of a new film, Why Are We in Afghanistan, written by Michael Zweig and illustrated by Mike Konopacki. This film looks at domestic pressures and geo-strategic interests that keep the U.S. in the region, and the long history of U.S. foreign interventions that forms the broader context for this war. We also see today’s peace movement continuing another long tradition – popular resistance to war. You can view the film and order a copy at www.WhyAreWeInAfghanistan.org.
Center for Working-Class Studies, Youngstown State University
This year, the Center is hosting a number of visiting scholars, including sociologist James Rhodes, a Simon Research Fellow from the University of Manchester; Eva Viertlboeck, a PhD Candidate in American Studies from the University of Regensburg; Tanja Aho, an MA candidate from the University of Leipzig; and Tom Welsh, a local historian who is studying the oldest Hispanic Catholic church in the Mahoning Valley.
The CWCS is proud to announce the publication of a new book, No Matter How Many Windows, by Community Affiliate, Jeane Bryner. Jeanne has been an affiliate for over a decade and is a registered emergency room nurse. She is the author of several books and plays on family, work, and Appalachian life. The book can be ordered from Wind Publications.
The Center has recently completed the third in a series of public opinion polls. For analysis of the latest poll and to sign up to participate in the next one, visit the Center’s website, http://cwcs.ysu.edu. On the site, you’ll also find several new additions, including a selection of stories about local working-class issues, produced by students in YSU’s Journalism Program through NewsOutlet.org, the program’s print and broadcast news service. As part of its work on community journalism, the Center will co-sponsor a visit by New York Times reporter David Gonzales in May.
Those who attended conferences at Youngstown over the years will be pleased to hear that the Center’s Administrative Assistant, Patty LaPresta, has been given YSU’s Distinguished Service Award. Center co-director Sherry Linkon was recognized for the Center’s work on diversity with a Campus Diversity Leadership award.
Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies
The Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies, in conjunction with the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, will host the 2011 conference of the Working-Class Studies Association. It will be a bit later than usual, June 22 through June 25, so mark your 2011 calendars now. We will be at the U. of Illinois Chicago Campus just off the Loop, and we’ll have plenty of dorm rooms at reasonable rates, as well as some semi-reasonable rates at local hotels. The conference theme will be “Working-Class Organization and Power.”