The Labor and Working-Class History Association invites proposals for panels, roundtables, and workshops for its national conference in New York next June, 2013. Deadline for submissions is: September 15, 2012.
CALL FOR PAPERS:
“Rights, Solidarity and Justice: Working People Organizing, Past and Present”
LAWCHA National Conference, June 6-8, 2013 New York City
Meeting in a year in which surging corporate power has threatened both unions and democracy as we know it, the 2013 LAWCHA conference in New York City will focus on how varied groups of working people have built the solidarity needed to challenge their employers, each other, their communities, and the state to seek justice and improve their lives.
Historically and today women, immigrants and people of color have often been at the forefront of these struggles. Many have seen the revitalization of their organizations—unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and political movements—as critical to their struggles for equality and democracy in and beyond the workplace. In the present moment, faced with obstacles to organizing that evoke earlier centuries, workers and their allies are creating innovative organizational forms and strategies in the U.S. and around the world. LAWCHA seeks panels, roundtables, and workshop proposals that put today’s challenges and successes in deeper perspective, including comparisons across time, space, and national borders, and that explore the rich range of working peoples’ lives and movements, from Early American history to the Wisconsin upheaval and Occupy Wall Street.
Meeting a few blocks from the site of OWS at Brooklyn College’s Graduate Center for Worker Education, located in Manhattan in a city that has long been a laboratory of innovative working-class self-organization, we welcome panel proposals of all kinds, including those that are historical, contemporary, transnational, or comparative, and those that combine activists and academics.
LAWCHA is also interested in proposals for workshops and roundtables that examine past experience and current strategies for work in areas of LAWCHA’s on-going activity—historical memory and commemoration; teaching labor history in the schools; building global networks of labor historians; and labor activism and solidarity, as well as skills workshops on the art of organizing, op-ed writing and other media work, building labor centers and more. We envision the possibility of threads of linked sessions in each of these areas of interest forming a significant part of the program.
We also encourage more conversational sessions than the conventional 3-paper/commentator format. While we welcome individual paper proposals, we are especially keen to receive proposals for complete sessions.
Send proposals for panels (or individual papers), roundtables, and workshops to LAWCHA conference program committee:
lawcha.cfp+2013NYC [a] gmail.com
Proposals should include brief abstracts for sessions and individual papers and short biographies/c.v.s for participants.
DEADLINE for submissions is: September 15, 2012; notification by December 15, 2012.
Conference sessions and accommodations will be in and around the NYU/Brooklyn College campus in lower Manhattan.