Tag: WCSA Awards

Call for Annual Awards

The Working-Class Studies Association calls for nominations for our annual awards. Please consider nominating an entry, and please circulate the attached call.

Our award categories are:

  • Studs Terkel Award: for single published articles or series, broadcast media, multimedia, and film in media and journalism
  • Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing: for published books of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and other genres
  • C.L.R. James Award: for Published Books for Academic or General Audiences
  • Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award: for books by writer(s) of working-class origins that speak to issues of the working-class academic experience
  • Russo & Linkon Award: for published article or essay for academic or general audiences
  • Constance Coiner Award: for completed dissertations
  • Lifetime Achievement Award

In all categories, we invite nominations of excellent work that provides insightful and engaging depictions of working-class life, culture, and movements; addresses issues related to the working class; and highlights the voices, experiences, and perspectives of working-class people.

To be eligible, works must have been published (in the case of books or articles) or completed (in the case of films and dissertations) between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020.

Details of the awards and past winners can be found here.

To nominate a work for consideration, please send three hard copies with a cover letter, identifying the category in which the work is being nominated and a brief explanation of why it deserves recognition, to the address below. The nominating party, whether author or publisher–has the responsibility to make sure three copies with a cover letter are submitted. NOTE: Articles and dissertations should be submitted in electronic form to <scott.henkel@uwyo.edu>.

For the Lifetime Achievement Award, please submit a detailed letter of nomination (or self-nomination) to <scott.henkel@uwyo.edu>. The letter should document the range of the nominees’ contributions to the field of Working-Class Studies and the advancement of working-class causes, whether in or beyond higher education. 

WCSA call for awards 2020Download

Nominations are due no later than January 31, 2021.

Submit nominations to:

Dr. Scott Henkel

Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research

Cooper House

Department 3353

University of Wyoming

1000 E. University Ave.

Laramie, WY 82071

2020 Working-Class Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award ~ Janet Zandy

PRESS RELEASE

July 21, 2020

CONTACT:

Terry Easton, past WCSA president

The WCSA, an international network of scholars, activists, and artists interested in working-class issues, offers lifetime achievement awards to those who have made significant, long-running contributions to the field of Working-Class Studies.

Janet Zandy’s body of work fuses the lived experience of working-class people with theoretical sophistication and commitment to democratic ideals. For over thirty years, her scholarship has provided foundational ideas and texts for the emergence of working-class studies as a field. In Calling Home: Working-Class Women’s Writing (1990), Zandy challenges canonical notions of literary value when introducing readers to the lived and imagined experiences of working-class and poor women writers. In Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness (1994), Zandy reveals the power of memory and identity as a usable past through voices of academic and cultural workers from working-class origins who had migrated to middle-class institutions or settings. Emerging from an expanded version of the 1995 special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on class, What We Hold in Common: An Introduction to Working-Class Studies (2001) connects the visionary with the possible through scholarship, creative writing, educational initiatives, syllabi, and bibliographies from new and established writers and workers. In Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work (2004, Honorable Mention, John Hope Franklin Prize in American Studies), Zandy creates a juncture where seemingly disparate voices and events coalesce to enable meditation on the architectonics of human bodies, particularly workers’ hands, the body part that provides “lucid maps to the geography of human complexity” (1). Zandy’s collaboration with Nicholas Coles, American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology (2007), offers an astounding collection of 150 non-canonical and canonical writers of varied races, ethnicities, genders, geographies, and religious backgrounds across 400 years of cultural expression, and has become an essential sourcebook for working-class studies pedagogy and historical reclamation.

After developing a course in photography and writing in 2005, Zandy turned her scholarship toward photography, probing how class shapes the history of photography. She published two articles in exposure, “Photography and Writing: A Pedagogy of Seeing,” and “Seeing Beyond Dirt: The Language of Working-Class Photography,” a study of photography by and about workers that received the Society for Photographic Education award for outstanding historical and cultural writing on photography in 2010.  Zandy received an Ansel Adams Research Fellowship and Peter E. Palmquist award for research on women photographers Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. Her book on Mieth and Palfi, Unfinished Stories: The Narrative Photography of Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi, was published in 2013. Zandy also published on photographer Milton Rogovin in New Labor Forum and Transformations. Forthcoming in the Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies is “Mapping Working-Class Art,” a chapter that led to her current project, Common Art/Common-ing Art, a book on class, art, and workers that identifies power relationships and constitutive elements of working-class art expressed in presentations of laborers, slaves, peasants, servants, sowers, planters, and reapers in printmaking, painting, photography, and sculpture.

Pedagogy is another component of Zandy’s contribution to the field of working-class studies. As a professor in the English Department at Rochester Institute of Technology (now Professor Emerita), where for many years she taught up to nine courses a year, Zandy guided several generations of undergraduate students through analysis of the intersections of class, gender, race, sexuality, and environmental justice. With a devotion to teaching as energetic as her attention to writing, Zandy’s students learned how to see themselves as part of something larger. In an end-of-the-semester reflection in her New American Literature course, a student responded to Zandy’s prompt drawn from Antonio Gramsci’s  ideas about the purpose of education (“to know oneself better through others and to know others better through oneself”): “We rarely are pressed to look at the world through other people’s eyes. We are allowed to sit in our quiet comfort zones and dwell on our own lives. Therefore, when given a book where the characters’ lives are so dramatic and filled with emotion the only way to give justice to the work is to leave our comfort zones and become a part of the text ourselves.” Akin to Lewis Hine’s work with a camera, so too did Zandy’s classroom labor enable students to cultivate a new way of seeing, a class-consciousness, and a sense agency.

In 2020, as we create a world – a text – where empathy bends the moral arc toward justice, Zandy’s scholarship, historical reclamation, and pedagogical legacy are central to a field that demands answerability through dialogic approaches to texts, art, and political terrain, widely defined. Read one of her books, talk to her at one of our conferences, or join her in Rochester, New York, for Workers Memorial Day, an annual public gathering that commemorates the thousands of workers whose deaths, injuries, and occupational illnesses result from their jobs; in this heteroglossic space where workers names are read aloud, testimony unites the living and the dead where the past is remembered, current struggles are acknowledged, and worker safety is demanded.

In 1995, at the Working-Class Lives/Working-Class Studies Conference in Youngstown, Ohio, Zandy presented on “traveling working class.” She describes the conference as a “jubilant occasion” where she and others felt a “new trajectory” that “validated the importance of carrying the best of working-class values, ethos, and knowledge into the academy, and of using that rich, complex, even discordant heritage to expand what constitutes knowledge.” To her delight she realized that people no longer had to work in isolation, but instead had allies, “builders from inside and outside working-class lived experience” (What We Hold in Common ix). Since that touchstone 1995 conference, Zandy’s light continues to shine through generations of scholars she has mentored. In her oeuvre, Zandy illustrates that working-class voices are tools of resistance to class domination and cultural elision. Let’s cinch up our shoes and keep traveling working class as we honor Janet Zandy for her work in forging a multi-voiced, mellifluent, and discordant collective designed by, for, and in the interests of working-class people.

~Terry Easton

2020 Working-Class Studies Association Awards for work produced in 2019

2020 Working-Class Studies Association Awards for work produced in 2019

July 5, 2020 (Download the press release here).

CONTACT: Cherie Rankin, immediate-past president and 2019 awards organizer

Each year, the Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA) issues a number of awards to recognize the best new work in the field of working-class studies. The review process of submitted work is organized by the past-president of the WCSA, and submissions are judged by a panel of three readers for each of the categories of awards.

Awards are normally awarded at the annual WCSA conference; due to the COVID-19 crisis and the postponement of the conference, awards have been announced privately to the winners and are being made public here.

This year’s winners and judges’ comments are listed below. Together these works demonstrate the scope and vitality of cultural and scholarly production in working-class studies, and they serve as an inspiration to future work in the field. With this year’s annual conference postponed, we are sharing the slide show of award recipients that would have been presented at the conference below:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

2020 Awards Slides

 

C.L.R. James Award for Published Book for Academic or General Audiences 

Christopher R. Martin, No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class

Judges’ comments:

Martin “examines the shifts in journalistic trends that parallel both deindustrialization  and the conservative political turn from the late 1960s onward, paying particularly attention, for instance, to the increasing preference for upscale (middle- and upper-class) readers at the expense of labor reporting and stories by and about working people. He does a masterful job exploring how the term ‘job killer’ was adopted and deployed by conservative politicians and business elites as a way to undermine work meant to protect the social safety net, union efforts, environmental protections, and the like from Reagan until the present moment, and demonstrates that it is precisely those CEOs lauded in mass media as ‘job makers’ who are the real job killers.”

“Author Christopher Martin identifies reforms that promise to restore the visibility and voice of the working class, to the benefit of the media, the working-class majority, and indeed, the country as a whole. This book deserves the widest possible audience!”

 

Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing

Jodie Adams Kirshner, Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises

Judges’ Comments:

“Kirshner is a self-appointed defense attorney for Detroit’s leftovers. Her knowledge has depth and heart.”

“Excellent nonfiction work on the undoing of Detroit; love the way the author follows key players through the story with insider knowledge of the world she depicts. Rigorously researched. Important work. Exemplar we could turn to in envisioning other working-class stories of place.”

“Without succumbing to a single point of view, Jodie Adams Kirshner brings together a wide cast of those most affected and thereby opens the case of and for Detroit and our other large cities suffering financial strain. This is a book is worth reading for its essential story as well as its eloquence of style.”

 

John Russo & Sherry Linkon Award for Published Article or Essay for Academic or General Audiences

Pamela Fox, “Born to Run and Reckless: My Life as a Pretender.” From Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions.

Judges’ comments:

“Rich analysis and very useful movement between the musician autobiographies, theories of autobiography, and how the latter have to be complicated by a class analysis. Popular music narratives and experiences form a counter narrative to power, a ‘politics of hope’ in contrast to dominant narratives of class and disability, class as disability. Her suggestion of ‘reparative practices’ should be taken up in working-class studies and fleshed out.”

 

Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism

Alison Stine, “Last Days of the Appalachian Poverty Tour.”

Judges’ comments:

“The article is both reflective and hard-hitting with its push to illustrate for readers some of the main characteristics of impoverished communities, without over generalizing or stereotyping.”

“Provides a complex analysis that includes both the oppression and pain but also the resilience and community of working/poverty-class life.”

“As insightful as it was beautiful— poetic prose.”

 

Constance Coiner Award for Best Dissertation

Melissa Meade, In the Shadow of ‘King Coal’: Memory, Media, Identity, and Culture in the Post-Industrial Pennsylvania Anthracite Region

Judges’ comments:

“It is an affirmation of the importance of working-class stories and provides the working-class subjects with agency. The work also considers the intersections of race/ethnicity and gender in its examination of identity formation and also considers the ‘environmental classism’ which is a result of polluted and poisoned landscapes.”

“This is an excellent dissertation, and a valuable advancement of our knowledge regarding working class identity and media.”

“Soundly theorized, yet poignantly human and personal.  A new vantage point on an oft-studied region. The trope of the decades-long fire smoldering under this region of the country resonates powerfully in our current political environment.”

 

Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award for a Book about the Working-Class Academic Experience (two awards)

Editor Jackie Goode, Clever Girls: Autoethnographies of Class, Gender and Ethnicity.

Judges’ comments:

“I really liked the timeliness of this book and the way the contributors dealt with the intersections of class, ethnicity, and gender. I also liked how the contributors dealt with both the public and the private spheres. Really interesting chapters and a very powerful conclusion.”

“This is an edited collection of autoethnographic essays on upward mobility through higher education for ‘clever girls’ mostly, but not entirely, from the British working class. It is a wonderfully evocative collection that really opens up the experience of class transition to the reader, positively inviting the reader to tell their own story – a wonderful use of autoethnography, and a great book for working class students and faculty alike, as well as having some appeal to a general public.”

Allison Hurst, Amplified Advantage: Going to a ‘Good College’ in an Era of Inequality

Judges’ comments:

“This is a hugely important book. By looking at different types of students in the American liberal arts college tradition, it demonstrates clearly and vividly that the situation for working class students in higher education is not simply one of equal opportunities or even equal access.”

“I think this book is particularly timely in terms of the recent admissions scandals, and I appreciated the personal perspective.”

“This is an excellent look in the sub-field of the sociology of higher education.”

 

Special thanks to those who served as judges:

Sarah Attfield

Jeanne Bryner

Luka Cheung

Jamie Daniel

Jessica Femiani

Nathan Heggins Bryant

Scott Henkel

Barb Jensen

Gary Jones

Lisa Kirby

Christie Launius

Jessica Pauszek

Cherie Rankin

Larry Smith

Jen Vernon

James Vanderputten

Joe Varga

Valerie Walkerdyne

 

WCSA Award Nominations – Deadline Extended to January 15th!

The deadline for WCSA Award nominations has been extended to January 15, 2020!

The Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA) invites nominations (including self-nominations) for awards covering the year of 2019.

Award categories are:

  • Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing: Published books of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and other genres
  • C.L.R. James Award for Published Books for Academic or General Audiences
  • Russo & Linkon Award for Published Article or Essay for Academic or General Audiences
  • Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism: Single published articles or series, broadcast media, multimedia, and film
  • Constance Coiner Award for Best Dissertation: Completed dissertations only
  • Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award: Book by creator of working-class origins; work that speaks to issues of the working-class academic experience

In all categories, we invite nominations of work that provides insightful and engaging depictions of working-class life, culture, and movements, which addresses issues related to the working class, and which highlights the voices, experiences, and perspectives of working-class people.

To be eligible, works must have been published (in the case of books or articles) or completed (in the case of films and dissertations) between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019.

To nominate a work for consideration, please ask your publisher to send four hard copies with a cover letter, identifying the category in which the work is being nominated and a brief explanation of why it deserves recognition. It is the author’s responsibility to make sure four copies with a cover letter are submitted.

Nominations are due no later than January 15, 2020.

Submit nominations to:

Cherie Rankin

Heartland Community College

1500 W. Raab Road

Normal, IL  61761

NOTE: Articles and dissertations should be submitted in electronic form to Cherie Rankin at wibblet68@gmail.com

For more information, contact Cherie Rankin, WCSA Past-President, wibblet68@gmail.com

Winners will be announced in spring, 2020. Winners will receive free conference registration and an award acrylic at the WCSA Annual Awards Ceremony. The conference will be held May 20-24 at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, USA. Conference attendance is strongly encouraged. Details of the awards and past winners can be found on the WCSA website here.

Details of the awards and past winners can be found here.

Reminder: Call for 2019 Annual Working-Class Studies Association Award Submissions

The Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA) invites nominations (including self-nominations) for awards covering the year of 2019.

Award categories are:

  • Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing: Published books of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and other genres
  • C.L.R. James Award for Published Books for Academic or General Audiences
  • Russo & Linkon Award for Published Article or Essay for Academic or General Audiences
  • Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism: Single published articles or series, broadcast media, multimedia, and film
  • Constance Coiner Award for Best Dissertation: Completed dissertations only
  • Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award: Book by creator of working-class origins; work that speaks to issues of the working-class academic experience

In all categories, we invite nominations of work that provides insightful and engaging depictions of working-class life, culture, and movements, which addresses issues related to the working class, and which highlights the voices, experiences, and perspectives of working-class people.

To be eligible, works must have been published (in the case of books or articles) or completed (in the case of films and dissertations) between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019.

To nominate a work for consideration, please ask your publisher to send four hard copies with a cover letter, identifying the category in which the work is being nominated and a brief explanation of why it deserves recognition. It is the author’s responsibility to make sure four copies with a cover letter are submitted.

Nominations are due no later than December 31, 2019.

Submit nominations to:

Cherie Rankin

Heartland Community College

1500 W. Raab Road

Normal, IL  61761

NOTE: Articles and dissertations should be submitted in electronic form to Cherie Rankin at wibblet68@gmail.com

For more information, contact Cherie Rankin, WCSA Past-President, wibblet68@gmail.com

Winners will be announced in spring, 2020. Winners will receive free conference registration and an award acrylic at the WCSA Annual Awards Ceremony. The conference will be held May 20-24 at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, USA. Conference attendance is strongly encouraged. Details of the awards and past winners can be found on the WCSA website here.

Call for 2019 Annual Working-Class Studies Association Award Submissions

The Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA) invites nominations (including self-nominations) for awards covering the year of 2019.

Award categories are:

  • Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing: Published books of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and other genres
  • C.L.R. James Award for Published Books for Academic or General Audiences
  • Russo & Linkon Award for Published Article or Essay for Academic or General Audiences
  • Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism: Single published articles or series, broadcast media, multimedia, and film
  • Constance Coiner Award for Best Dissertation: Completed dissertations only
  • Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award: Book by creator of working-class origins; work that speaks to issues of the working-class academic experience

In all categories, we invite nominations of work that provides insightful and engaging depictions of working-class life, culture, and movements, which addresses issues related to the working class, and which highlights the voices, experiences, and perspectives of working-class people.

To be eligible, works must have been published (in the case of books or articles) or completed (in the case of films and dissertations) between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019.

To nominate a work for consideration, please ask your publisher to send four hard copies with a cover letter, identifying the category in which the work is being nominated and a brief explanation of why it deserves recognition. It is the author’s responsibility to make sure four copies with a cover letter are submitted.

Nominations are due no later than December 31, 2019.

Submit nominations to:

Cherie Rankin

Heartland Community College

1500 W. Raab Road

Normal, IL  61761

NOTE: Articles and dissertations should be submitted in electronic form to Cherie Rankin at wibblet68@gmail.com

For more information, contact Cherie Rankin, WCSA Past-President, wibblet68@gmail.com

Winners will be announced in spring, 2020. Winners will receive free conference registration and an award acrylic at the WCSA Annual Awards Ceremony. The conference will be held May 20-24 at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, USA. Conference attendance is strongly encouraged. Details of the awards and past winners can be found on the WCSA website here.

Call for 2017 Annual WCSA Award Submissions

The Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA) invites nominations (including self-nominations) for awards covering the year of 2017.

Award categories are:

  • Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing: Published books of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and other genres
  • C.L.R. James Award for Published Books for Academic or General Audiences
  • Russo & Linkon Award for Published Article or Essay for Academic or General Audiences
  • Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism: Single published articles or series, broadcast media, multimedia, and film
  • Constance Coiner Award for Best Dissertation: Completed dissertations only

In all categories, we invite nominations of excellent work that provides insightful and engaging depictions of working-class life, culture, and movements; addresses issues related to the working class; and highlights the voices, experiences, and perspectives of working-class people.

To be eligible, works must have been published (in the case of books or articles) or completed (in the case of films and dissertations) between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2017.

To nominate a work for consideration, please send three hard copies with a cover letter, identifying the category in which the work is being nominated and a brief explanation of why it deserves recognition.  Please note: articles and dissertations should be submitted in electronic form.

Nominations are due by January 15, 2018.

 

Submit nominations to:

Dr. Michele Fazio

Associate Professor of English

University of North Carolina at Pembroke

1 University Drive

Pembroke, NC  28372

For more information and to submit electronic submissions, contact:    Michele Fazio, WCSA Past-President at michele.fazio@uncp.edu.

 

Winners will be announced at the 2018 Working-Class Studies Association conference to be held June 6-9, 2018 at the Center for the Study of Inequalities, Social Justice, & Policy at Stony Brook University.  Winners will receive free conference registration and a plaque at the WCSA Annual Awards Ceremony. In addition, a panel session will be reserved in the conference program to feature a discussion of award recipients’ work.  Conference attendance is strongly encouraged.

Details of the awards and past winners can be found here.