Announcing the first WCSA Advisory! The Advisory was created to support the Association in keeping with its values. In January 2023, the first team was appointed. It includes Claude Taylor, Renny Christopher, Barbara Jensen, Lita Kurth, and Elaine Laberge. The term runs for one year, from January-December. They are non-voting members who meet independently, participate in Executive team meetings, and advise on WCSA’s past practices and future.
Claude Taylor
Claude Taylor serves as Director for Academic Transition and Inclusion at Monmouth and is a lecturer in Communication Studies. His scholarly interests include social class, practices of consumption, communication theory and the mediated representation of gender, racial and cultural identities. Claude regularly teaches courses in Gender, Race and Media, Communication Ethics, Media Literacy, Communication and Social Class, Political Communication, and Civic Participation.
He is an active member of the Working Class Studies Association, NACADA the Global Community for Academic Advising, NASPA Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association and the National Association of Media Literacy Education. He received both his B.A. in Speech Communication and M.A. in Communication Studies from West Chester University of Pennsylvania.
Claude leads the campus-wide initiative First to Fly: First Generation at Monmouth which empowers first-generation and historically underrepresented students to successfully navigate academic, personal, and structural challenges they may encounter. This student success initiative connects Monmouth students who are first in their families to go to college with campus resources and encourages their active engagement with an inclusive, multicultural community of support.
Under his leadership Monmouth has been designated as a First-gen Forward Institution, the nation’s first recognition program acknowledging higher education institutions for their commitment to first-generation student success.
Renny Christopher
Renny Christopher is Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs at Washington State University Vancouver. A Carpenter’s Daughter: A Working-Class Woman in Higher Education (Sense Publishers, 2009), addresses xyr experiences as the first in xyr family to attend college. Before earning a doctorate, Christopher worked as a printing press operator, typesetter, carpenter and horse wrangler.
Lita Kurth
Lita Kurth grew up in northern rural poverty in the US with nine siblings. She went on to earn a B.A. (University of Wisconsin), M.A.+ all coursework for Ph.D. (UC Berkeley), M.A. (San Francisco State), and an MFA (Rainier Writers Workshop). She is a lecturer at De Anza College in Cupertino, California where she teaches Creative Writing and also teaches private creative writing workshops through CreatorSchoolCA and galleries.
She has presented at WCSA conferences since the one in Pittsburgh (2009) and served on the Outreach committee for several years. She has published in three genres: fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry and has had work nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. She won the Diana Woods prize for “This is the Way We Wash the Clothes” (Lunchticket) and has received several creative writing fellowships. She is interested in practically everything working class.
Barbara Jensen
Barbara Jensen is a full-time community and counseling psychologist. Barbara has worked as a psychologist in schools, homeless shelters, psychiatric residences, and in 35 years of private practice. A musician and dramatist, she works with groups to integrate mental health with art and Drama therapies. As a scholar, she has led lectures and workshops most of her adult life on Class and Classism in a wide range of settings: parent educators, public schools, colleges, prisons, and mental health clinics, the Minnesota Department of Health and Human Services and peer supervision groups of therapists.
Over 20 years, she developed and taught a variety of courses at Metropolitan State University: including Community Psychology, Working in America, and Psychology of Women. She is a founding member of the Working Class Studies Association (WCSA), and co-chaired the first WCSA conference in St. Paul in 2007 at Macalester College and was president of the WCSA in 2013. She published Reading Classes: On Culture, and Classism in America in 2012 with Cornell University Press. Her latest publication is in the Routledge International Handbook of Working Class Studies. In 2022 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from WCSA. FFI: barbarajensen.net.
*Advisory member Barbara Jensen has temporarily taken leave to serve as interim, WCSA Past-President. She will return in July 2023.
Elaine Laberge
Elaine J Laberge (PhD) is a sociologist who focuses on poverty discrimination and classism in Canadian universities and more broadly in Canadian society. Her research focuses on “poverty-class” students and demonstrates how universities can support this oft-overlooked demographic from the grassroots to structural level change.
She is the founder of ShoestringInitiative.com which is the first-of-its-kind grassroots movement to support students from poverty in higher education. Elaine is a professional graphic designer who is known for her engaging knowledge mobilization and translation communication strategies and designs. She is a poet and aspiring playwright and documentary filmmaker.