Labor and Class Studies

These themes, so well developed during Michael’s years of leadership, will remain a bedrock focus of our activities. Scholarly projects and collaborations in this area will unite the interests and insights of labor economists (though Michael will be missed, we do still have a couple of faculty) and historians concentrating on work and workers (including Christopher Sellers and Lori Flores) along with other interested Stony Brook faculty. Christopher Sellers is especially interested to foster discussions about the relationships between newer scholarship and findings on income and wealth inequality and other more established literatures on the making and experiences of class. We hope to continue our sponsorship of the WCSA conference along with outreach efforts on Long Island with labor unions and other civic groups. One CWCS event modeling the kind of outreach we’re hoping to continue was a wellattended visit in 2015 of Rev. William J. Barber, North Carolina NAACP president and founder of the Moral Monday Movement. We hope the lines of communication thereby established with many Long Island activist communities will provide a springboard for future activities exploring and highlighting and economic inequalities in the region and their ties to other inequities.