Past Conferences
A Conference at SUNY-Stony Brook - 2003
(March 28-29, 2003)

Conference Report
By Michael Zweig, Convenor
Group for the Study of Working Class Life
Department of Economics
State University of New York
Stony Brook, NY 11794-4384
631 632-7536
mzweig@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
http://www.workingclass.sunysb.edu

The How Class Works conference, held at SUNY Stony Brook June 5-9, 2002, was a success in a number of ways and has set the stage for further developments in working class studies, especially in the social sciences.

The Conference:
The principal accomplishment was bringing together a diverse group of people to discuss a broad range of issues concerning class. Over two hundred and fifty people attended, including the more than one hundred and forty people who presented their work in forty-seven sessions. [The full program is available on the “conference” pages of our Website, http://www.workingclass.sunysb.edu. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first U.S. conference based in the social sciences to be devoted to issues of class.

A remarkably diverse group not often found together pursuing a common agenda attended the conference. Most were based in academic institutions but there were also many participants active in the labor movement. Each of these groups was unusually diverse internally as well.

Academics included senior scholars with international reputations, younger faculty, graduate students, and a few undergraduates, including a panel of working class community college students from rural Upstate New York reporting their experiences learning about class and their own lives in a sociology course. Faculty came from elite Ivy League colleges and major public universities as well as four-year colleges and community colleges. Three scholars were in their eighties; the youngest presenter was twenty. Speakers came from six SUNY campuses (Albany, Binghamton, Cortland, Geneseo, Old Westbury, and Stony Brook). Scholarly work represented seventeen academic fields: American studies, anthropology, architecture and planning, art, black studies, communications, economics, education, English literature, history, labor studies, linguistics, political science, psychology, clinical medicine and public health, sociology, and women’s studies. Independent scholars, public intellectuals, and community activists also attended and presented their work. Six sessions were devoted to exploring the pedagogy of class - presenters discussed various strategies for teaching about class to students from different class backgrounds, based on experiences in a range of educational settings.

In addition to the academics, a number of people from the labor movement attended, some as speakers. They came from private and public sector unions and from non-union worker organizations – elected officials, staff members, and rank-and-file workers. Labor organizations present at the conference included the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), American Postal Workers Union (APWU), Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), Communications Workers of America (CWA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO, South Carolina AFL-CIO, Transport Workers Union (TWU), Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE!), Workfare Media Initiative, and the Workplace Project. The closing conference speaker was Zwelinzima Vavi, General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), who made a special trip from South Africa to attend.

In addition to South Africa, participants came from Australia, Britain, Canada, and all over the United States. They were Asian, black, Hispanic, and white, with men and women in roughly equal numbers. The demographic and occupational mix of participants suggests how attention to class can bring together a diverse array of people concerned with common issues.
The conference included several cultural events, among them two performances of Playback Theater (NYC) and a poetry reading. A photography exhibit displayed images taken by workers in several projects of Unseen America, including some by immigrant Latino workers on Long Island. Six documentary films were shown with the filmmakers present to participate in discussion with the audience.

On their conference evaluation forms, participants said they welcomed the opportunity to address issues of class and appreciated the cultural events. The one aspect of the conference that drew consistent and strong criticism was the on-campus housing in Roth Quad dormitories. Many who stayed in the dorms complained about the lack of soap and blankets, broken elevators, keys that didn’t work, and cold and dirty rooms. On a positive note, conference evaluation forms often commented favorably on the “interdisciplinary nature of topics and participants’ backgrounds [and] networking with others interested in my research area but from different disciplines” and “the mix of academics and practicing unionists on panels.” The conference showed that attention to the lived experience of class can be a catalyst for work in which intellectual investigation is grounded and experiential reports are informed by social and intellectual context.

Support:
The conference was the product of the collective efforts of the Stony Brook University community, with significant contributions from outside sources as well. On campus, the Group for the Study of Working Class Life organized the conference. Members of the program committee were Ruth Benzvi (Economics), Fred Gardaphe (European Languages and Literature), Jacqueline Smith (Sociology), Nancy Tomes (History), Olufemi Vaughan (Africana Studies), and Michael Zweig (Economics). The Office of Conferences and Special Events, the Department of Student Union and Activities, and the Departments of Economics and Theater provided essential logistical support. President Shirley Strum Kenny, Provost Robert McGrath, Vice-President for Research Gail Habicht, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Robert Liebermann, Dean of the Graduate School Lawrence Martin, and Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) David Ferguson provided financial support that brought in the plenary speakers and Playback Theater (NYC), allowed the conference to hire fourteen Stony Brook graduate students from six departments to work as staff and have access to all events, and made it possible to record and transcribe many of the presentations. Thirty-two Stony Brook faculty and professional staff from seventeen departments and programs served as chairs of conference sessions. The University Bookstore set up and staffed a mini-bookstore on the conference site where participants had access to books by the presenters and other relevant titles at discount prices. Many conference attendees expressed appreciation for the bookstore.
Outside grants of support came from anonymous, Polly Howells and Eric Werthman, and United University Professions (Local 2190, American Federation of Teachers – NYSUT – AFL-CIO, representing 27,000 faculty and professional staff throughout the SUNY system). The American Center for International Labor Solidarity, AFL-CIO, provided material and logistical support to bring Zwelinzima Vavi to the conference from Johannesburg.

Next steps:
The conference has set the stage for further developments in working class studies. The following steps are already underway.
The Website http://www.workingclass.sunysb.edu will continue to host the conference program with links to presenters so anyone can find available papers from the conference and engage presenters in further dialogue. Links will be posted on July 15, 2002.

Cornell University Press has expressed serious interest in publishing a book to be called How Class Works, derived from conference presentations. I am collecting and editing submissions with the hope that the book will be available by December 2003.

I am continuing to work with Danny Schechter of Globalvision, an independent television production company, to make a documentary film on class. Globalvision sent a film crew to the conference to document sessions and conduct interviews. The conference provided useful footage as well as leads to other appropriate stories.

During the 2002-2003 academic year the Group for the Study of Working Class Life will extend its programming to the Stony Brook Manhattan facility while continuing to sponsor a range of events at Stony Brook. We plan to work closely with labor education centers and labor organizations in New York City to sponsor activities that complement and enhance their work.

We have already reserved space at Stony Brook for the second How Class Works conference, tentatively planned for June 3-6, 2004. We hope that a review of this year’s conference evaluations will help us to have an even stronger event next time. We will continue to encourage new work in the field, especially in the social sciences, through our programs and through the call for papers for the second How Class Works conference. Our work complements that of the Center for Working Class Studies (CWCS) at Youngstown State University in Ohio, where the emphasis is in the humanities and major conferences occur every second year in odd-number years. We also hope to work with others around the country to develop regional conferences and centers of working class studies.

We will continue to seek funds from campus sources and from interested persons and institutions off campus. We will help Stony Brook faculty, graduate students, and professional staff find the financial and intellectual support they need to create new knowledge in the field and to develop more nuanced understandings of class. Issues of class are becoming increasingly salient in the world around us. We are confident that the experience of the first How Class Works conference, and the newspaper, radio, and television coverage it engendered, augur well for future growth in working class studies.