CFP: Social and Economic Restructuring: Midwest Labor and Working Class
History Colloquium,
April 16-17 2010 Urbana Illnois
The United States, it appears, is undergoing a massive economic
restructuring. After decades of growth centered on Wall Street, personal
debt and service labor, the U.S. economy seems to have crumbled under its
own weight. Now that the failure of the financial sector has made another
chunk of the American middle class anxious, widening gaps between the rich
and the poor leave the state unequipped to provide a safety net for those
falling into poverty for the first time in a generation. Worse, large
employers in all sectors of the economy, from Ford to Big Ten Universities,
are using the economic crisis as an opportunity to bust unions and erode
employee benefits. Studies of class, labor and the impossible American
Dream are underfunded at the precise moment historical perspective may be
the most needed.
Our keynote address, Friday night, will be given by Mike Rosenow of the
University of Central Arkansas. Prize winning author and scholar of the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era, he will present ""There Was Blood: The
Accident Crisis and Cultures of Industrialization, 1877-1914."
We invite graduate student papers on topics of any time or place that
discuss poor and working people or the systems that produce such
inequalities. This year we will focus on the new language scholars must use
to address social and economic restructuring. How have similar crises
produced new kinds of work, new kinds of organizing labor, and new kinds of
repression against workers by the state and corporations? How can we redefine
our categories of class in the past to help explain present history to
contemporary audiences?
Convening at the University of Illinois for a Friday evening and full day
Saturday, April 16 and 17, 2010, the conference-workshop will feature
pre-circulated graduate student papers. Presenters are encouraged to
prepare a short introduction to their work, but the emphasis of each session
will be feedback from the community of scholars. Papers should be 20-25
pages and at a stage where critical feedback is encouraged. Send a C.V,
abstract and title to Jason Kozlowski
jckozlow@illinois.edu
by March 1. Papers due to Jason in full by April 1, 2010.
Janine Giordano
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
