WCSA in Action

American Studies Association ~ Nov. 2018

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A panel at the American Studies Association, Class Contingencies: Visibility and Absence in Contemporary Working-Class Representations, featuring Sherry Linkon, Robin Brooks, Joseph Entin, and Derrick A. Jones.
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Terry Easton, Associate Professor of English, Univ. of North Georgia, talking about his community project, “Border Crossing with Oral History and Photography.”
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Michele Fazio, Scott Henkel, Christie Launius, Vanessa Fonseca-Chavez, and Terry Easton at the American Studies Association, Nov. 2019, talking about the emerging field of working-class studies.
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Sherry Linkon presenting, “Deindustrial Intersections: Narrating Race, Gender, and Precarity in Contemporary Working Class Novels.”
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Dr. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Assistant Professor of English, Arizona State University, discussing her interdisciplinary ethnographic project, “Following the Manito Trail,” that documents Hispanic New Mexican, or Manito, migration from New Mexico to different parts of the United States during the last century.

Henkel Appointed as Director of UW’s Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research

WCSA President-Elect Scott Henkel has been named the new Director of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Wyoming.  Click here to read the full announcement.

2018-2019 Election Results

Please note the line-up of WCSA officers for 2018-2019.  Congratulation to all involved in the election process, and especially the Elections Committee (Jackie Gabriel, Jeremy Baker and Lisa Kirby).

2018 WCSA Awards Dinner

The Awards Dinner celebrated the winners of this year’s WCSA Awards.  Several additional awards were also announced, including the Young Scholars & Activists Fellowships and the newly-established Jake Ryan Book Award, which honors a publication from the past two years that speaks to issues of importance to the working-class academic experience.  The inaugural award goes to Diane Reay for MiseducationInequality, Education and the Working Classes.  “This work” as one judge wrote,” is an important capstone to a long career exploring class and education.  Reay artfully weaves together a trenchant critique of the educational system and its pretensions to facilitating social mobility with biographical anecdotes of passionate intensity.”

This year’s WCSA Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Paul Lauter.  He served as president of the American Studies Association and is the founding editor of the journal Radical Teacher and the author or editor of several books, including Literature, Class, and Culture and, most recently, A History of American Working-Class Literature.  As Michelle Tokarczyk writes, “As a working-class scholar and educator, there are so many ways I’m indebted to Paul Lauter. He was instrumental in founding The Feminist Press, which publishes books I teach every year. His anthology Literature, Class, and Culture includes a wide representation of texts that help students to understand what class is and how it works.”

For a complete list of awardees, click here.  Congratulations to all!

 

 

 

 

Read an Excerpt of Henkel’s Direct Democracy

The University Press of Mississippi has released an excerpt from WCSA member Scott Henkel’s forthcoming book, Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas. Read the excerpt here.

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