Working Class Studies Association | Class Matters | 2009 Conference

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The University of Pittsburgh's William Pitt Union is hosting the 2009 conference of the Working Class Studies Association, featuring four days of panels, performances, workshops, site visits, and social events. The Working Class Studies Association WCSA promotes models of study, action, and cultural production that serve the interest of working class people. Its biennial gathering draws activists, artists, educators, scholars, students, and workers from around the United States and the world.

Bridges

By Bill Yund
hardbred.com

Conference Information

Single-day registration available in person. Click here for registration options.

Conference Program (PDF)

Three Rivers / Three Tours of Historical Sites

Where to Eat in Oakland

Dowload Local Restaurant PDF

Activities in Oakland

• Carnegie Museum of Art
• Carnegie Museum of Natural History
• Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
• Phipps Conservatory
• Pittsburgh Art in Public Places--Oakland Walking Tour
• Schenley Park and Schenley Plaza
• University of Pittsburgh's Nationality Rooms

Message From WCSA President

The 1997 Working Class Studies Association conference in Youngstown was where I met the late great novelist Tillie Olsen and became committed to this organization and its meetings. Her infectious enthusiasm for the event, an ease and generosity that made Tillie literally embrace almost all of the very different people whom she met there, was not a product of loving anything as simple and potentially arid as academic interdisciplinarity. And yet it was in part the conference’s spectacular reach across disciplines, and beyond them into social struggles, that must have appealed to Olsen. Passionately curious about the histories and best practices of struggles against class, gender and racial oppression, she shared a featured spot in the conference with a wonderful, then-new film on Black steelworkers, Struggles in Steel, and with steelworkers themselves. Watching that film and especially as I watched Olsen, I became hooked on attending the conference regularly. Poetry, contemporary labor battles, the environment, argument, remembrance, education, music, media, politics and even humor have become as central to WCSA meetings as they are to working class life itself. I can count on seeing lots of familiar faces at the 2009 Pittsburgh conference and look forward to seeing many new ones. You won’t attend only once. There is nothing quite like it.

Dave Roediger

Thursday Cultural Event

A Hammer to Shape Reality

WPU Assembly Room
Thursday, June 4, 2009 8:00pm

Drama from Out of This Furnace (Andy Wolk’s adaptation of Thomas Bell’s novel, produced by thre Unseam’d Shakespeare Company) and Buried: the Sago Mine Disaster by Jerry Starr.
Music by Anne Feeney and Friends, produced by Marci Woodruff

Conference
Co-Sponsors

• School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh
• Working Class Studies Association
• English Department, University of Pittsburgh
• Anthropology Department, University of Pittsburgh
• History Department, University of Pittsburgh
• Sociology Department, University of Pittsburgh
• Cultural Studies Program, University of Pittsburgh
• Womens’ Studies Program, University of Pittsburgh
• English Department, Carnegie Mellon University
• Womens’ Studies Program, Carlow University
• Pennsylvania Labor Center, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
• Battle of Homestead Foundation
• United Steelworkers of America
• Center for Working-Class Studies, Youngstown State University
• Women's and Gender Studies Program, Duquesne University
• Center for Study of Working Class Life, SUNY Stony Brook