Class Dismissed?

Thursday, September 15 from 3-5 PM
Introductory discussion based on the New York Times series on social class in America:  Class Matters (2005).  Book will be available in the UIC bookstore.

Wednesday, October 19 from 3-5 PM
Institute for Humanities, lower level Stevenson Hall, 701 S. Morgan
Discussion of selections by Slavoj Zizek, who will speak at UIC on October 21. .

Slavoj Zizek readings:

-Interview: “Slavoj Zizek: Far Right and Anti-Immigrant Politicians on the Rise in Europe”
-“Repeating Lenin”
-“Shoplifters of the World Unite” (print version) LRB 19 August 2011
-“Good manners in the Age of WikiLinks” (print version)LRB Vol.33 No.2 – 20 January 2011
-Dean, Jodi.  “Fascism and Stalinism” (excerpts). Zizek’s Politics.  New York:  Routledge, 2006

Monday, February 6, 2012 from 3-5 p.m.
Jefferson Cowie-“A Nation Without Class: The 1970s and the Origins of Our Own Time”

Presentation and Seminar
Monday, February 6, 2012 from 3-5 p.m.
Institute for the Humanities, lower level Stevenson Hall, 701 S. Morgan

The seminar will begin with a “framing talk” by Jefferson Cowie and be followed by
a seminar discussion of readings from his book Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last
Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010).

Recommended readings for seminar:
Introduction: “Something’s Happening to People Like Me”
Chapter Two: “What Kind of Delegation is This?”
Chapter Seven: “The Important Sound of Things falling Apart”

Jefferson Cowie, Associate Professor of history at Cornell University, has been
called “one of our most commanding interpreters of recent American experience” by The
Nation magazine. His publications include Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest
for Cheap Labor (the New Press, 2001), that won the Taft Prize for Labor History in
2000 and Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New
Press 2010), awarded numerous prizes.

Thursday, March 15 from 3–5 p.m.
Panel Discussion: 
“Re-thinking Race, Class, and Gender”
Institute for the Humanities, lower level, Stevenson Hall, 701 S. Morgan, UIC

Panelists:
Walter Benn Michaels, UIC English
Corey Capers, UIC African American Studies and History
Leon Fink, UIC History
Nancy Fraser, New School for Social Research, 2011–2012 Visiting Fellow

April 5, 2012 from 3 – 5 p.m.
Carlos Forment, Associate Professor of Sociology, New School for Social Research
Argentina’s Recuperated Factory Movement, Neo Liberal Globalization and Citizenship: “An Arendtian Perspective”

This lecture seeks to understand, from an Arendtian perspective, how Buenos Aires’ recuperated factory workers, in the course of engaging in ‘participatory’ and ‘representative’ forms of democracy across the domestic and transnational domain, generated the social, political, legal, economic, and narrative resources they needed to transform themselves from pariahs into ‘really existing’ citizens. In tracking these practices across various micro-sites, I have accentuated the ways that these workers recycled the material and symbolic resources of neoliberalism rooted in ‘exchange value’ into ‘use value.’  Studying these practices is also an opportunity to explore some of the subterranean connections that have now developed between democratic life and globalization. This case study might shed light on similar cases across the ‘globalized south’ (South Africa), the ‘Euro-zone’ (Spain and Greece’s ‘indignados’) and in the People’s Republic of China.

Sponsored by the Departments of Political Science and History, the International Studies Program, and the Institute for the Humanities