Digital Commons Network^™

10 Steps To Reform Graduate Education In The Humanities, Katina Rogers

Publications and Research

Desperate times call for big changes. Here’s a summary of ten things professors and administrators should do to fix a broken graduate system—and suggestions for graduate students on how to survive in the mean time.

More Austerity Coming? Lessons From New York City's 1970s Fiscal Crisis, Marc Kagan

Publications and Research

Crises can be moments of opportunity, but it is not foreordained who will seize the ring. The Great Depression ultimately led to the New Deal/Great Society state and increasing equality. 1975 New York City fiscal crisis, on the other hand, laid the groundwork for decades of neoliberal austerity. Despite political vulnerabilities, bankers and their Washington allies acted boldly to protect imperiled assets and remake a city in which the working class wielded some power as a bastion of finance capital. Seemingly powerful unions abandoned the public they served, and followed a risk-averse strategy of concessions in exchange for junior-partner corporatism, …

For Tony Feliciano, A Friend And A Union Man, Marc Kagan

Publications and Research

My friend Tony Feliciano, transit worker 1984-2020, and a union man all his life, died a few weeks ago; he had just turned 61. While transit workers were dying this spring, he actually made it out of the 207th St. Overhaul Shop, where he worked virtually his whole career, in May; he put in his papers and retired to his house in Rockland County.

But he died of a heart attack, before he could even collect his first pension check.

Cgs Research And Policy Forum: Putting The Humanities Phd To Work, Katina Rogers

Publications and Research

These slides are from a presentation to the quarterly CGS Research & Policy Forum. The forum featured Dr. Katina Rogers and her new book, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and Beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2020). The talk centers on the notion that career development is not a standalone issue. Rather, it is embedded in questions of equity, inclusion, evaluation, labor structures, and more. There is an underlying stumbling block to meaningful change: a misalignment between values and structures, with a dominant economy of prestige often undermining efforts to support the public good. The structures that …

Food Frights: Covid-19 And The Specter Of Hunger, Maggie Dickinson

Publications and Research

Worries over widespread food shortages in the first few weeks of the COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States eclipsed the real hunger crisis on the horizon—one intimately tied to already existing inequalities. In the midst of the pandemic, the specter of hunger is haunting the same people it always has—the poor, the undocumented, low wage workers, the un- and under employed. It is not our supply systems that are breaking down and causing hunger, but our systems for ensuring people can access the food that exists which have been broken for a long time.

Work Alienation And Its Gravediggers: Social Class, Class Consciousness, And Activism, Jeremy Sawyer, Anup Gampa

Publications and Research

Work activity is central to human psychology. However, working conditions under capitalist socioeconomic relations have been posited as psychologically alienating. Given the negative impact of work alienation on well-being and mental health, we conducted two studies of the relations between social class, work conditions, and alienation. We also examined factors that might counteract alienation – class consciousness and activism. The utility of a Marxist measure of social class – based on objective work relations – was compared with that of SES and subjective class measures. Study 1 surveyed 240 U.S. adults from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; Study …

Capitalism And The Immigrant Rights Movement In The United States, Marcel Paret, Sofya Aptekar, Shannon Gleeson

Publications and Research

Social movements are full of contradictions, and an inherent tension often emerges between reformist and radical flanks. This becomes especially true as activists attempt to draw connections between varied aims such as opposition to globalization and support for immigrants. During the 1999 Battle of Seattle, the movement focused on opposing neoliberalism (Graeber 2002) and advocating for alternative visions of globalization (Reitan 2012). Some activists also noted the hypocrisy of opening borders to capital while militarizing the borders for migrants. Yet, in the end, immigrant rights movements and their central issues did not feature prominently in Seattle or later anti-globalization efforts. …