Event: "UC on Strike! Preserving Protest for Strike Success in Higher Ed Labor

Where: Reuther Library's Conference Room
When: January 22nd, 4 pm

Or join us on Zoom: http://tinyurl.com/4m84sse4

In November 2022, 48,000 graduate workers, post-docs, and academic researchers went on strike at the University of California in the largest strike in higher education to date. While the outcomes of the strike are well-documented, less is known about the three-year contract campaign that preceded it, the organizing strategies behind it, and the diversity of strikers’ day-to-day experiences on the picket line. UAW Labor Summer, a first-of-its kind multi-campus research initiative, enlisted graduate student fellows on all 10 UC campuses to document the historic campaign by collecting flyers and photographs, oral histories, and other digital artifacts towards creating a research archive. On Jan. 22nd, fellows from the program will join archivists from the Reuther Library to discuss the program, the role of archives in labor organizing, and the future of higher ed.

Panelists:

Caroline Luce is a historian whose work sits at the intersection of labor history, Jewish studies, and digital humanities. Currently a Project Director with the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, she served as the Chief Curator of Mapping Jewish LA, a project of the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies, and as chair of the Communications Committee of UC-AFT, representing lecturers and librarians at UC. Her research specialty is immigration, labor and working-class culture in the American west and she is working on a book manuscript entitled, Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Jewish Radicalism, Labor and Culture in Los Angeles.

Monica Geraffo is a fashion historian and 2nd year PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies at University of California Los Angeles. Interested in speculative fashion design, synthetic textile sciences, and performance conservation, she also holds an MA in Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, and Museum Practice from The Fashion Institute of Technology. Her writings can be found in the Film Fashion & Consumption Journal, public scholarship site The Middle Spaces, and via appearances with the Comics Arts Conference at San Diego Comic Con, TEDxBoston, Buzzfeed's As/Is, and as a co-host of VoxPopcast, a weekly pseudo-academic roundtable. She also works as a costume exhibition mounter for FIDM Museum Los Angeles and digital archivist for UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. She is dedicated to de-institutionalizing knowledge through digital humanities, public history, and the study of popular culture.

Gavin Strassel is the UAW Archivist at the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, at Wayne State University in Detroit. Before that, he served as the SEIU Archivist at the same institution. He is chair of the programming committee of the Michigan Labor History Society, an organization that celebrates the contributions made by working people of Michigan. He is also President of the Metro Detroit Archivists League.

Heeba Hartit is a PhD student at the University of California, Riverside in the Comparative Literature department and an Instructor in the University Writing Program. Over the summer of 2023, she worked as a Graduate Student Researcher with the UC Labor Center archiving the 2022 Fair UC Now campaign and strike. She currently serves on the Executive Board of UAW 2865.

This event is brought to you by Labor@Wayne, the Douglas A. Fraser Center for Workplace Issues, and Higher Ed Labor United.