Michael Zweig is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for the Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he has received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. His most recent books are What’s Class Got to Do with It?American Society in the Twenty-first Century (2004) and The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret (2000). Professor Zweig received his PhD in economics in 1967 from the University of Michigan where, as an undergraduate, he was a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and as a graduate student helped found the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE). He has a long history of social activism combined with scholarly work and has published widely in professional and general circulation journals, including The American Economic Review, The American Economist, The Review of Black Political Economy, The Review of Radical Political Economics, and Tikkun. His earlier books include Religion and Economic Justice and The Idea of a World University. Professor Zweig is active in his union, United University Professions (Local 2190, American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO), and has served two terms on its state executive board. He was named "Person of the Year" by the Long Island Suffolk Times for his writing and community organizing around issues of planning, zoning, and land use.

There is one reading specifically for the Thursday seminar that is available upon request.

Lois Weis is Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Education at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author and/or editor of numerous books and articles relating to race, class, gender, schooling and the economy. Her most recent volumes include Class Reunion: The Remaking of the American White Working Class (Routledge, 2004) and Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, race and gender in United States Schools (edited with Michelle Fine, SUNY Press, 2005). She sits on numerous editorial boards and is past President of the American Educational Studies Association.

Nancy MacLean (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, 1989) studies the workings of class, gender, race, and region in twentieth-century social movements and public policy. Her first book, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), was named a “noteworthy” book of the year by the New York Times Book Review, and received the Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Owsley Prize from the Southern Historical Association, and the Rosenhaupt Award from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Her most recent book is Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Harvard University Press, 2006). The recipient of an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, the book demonstrates the centrality of the fight for jobs and justice to the black freedom movement, the Mexican American civil rights movement, and the feminist movement, as it reveals new dimensions of conservative opposition to all three. Advancing a new interpretation of U.S. history over the last fifty years, it
shows how the interactions between these groups changed the country.
She is currently completing two books for course use. The Modern Women’s Movement: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, forthcoming 2007), and Debating the Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present, with Donald T. Critchlow (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming 2008). Her articles have appeared in Feminist Studies, Gender & History, In These Times, Labor, Labor History, the Journal of American History, The Nation, and the OAH Magazine of History. A recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Russell Sage Foundation, as well as Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research and Kaplan Humanities Center, she is one of the department’s several Charles Deering McCormick Professors of Teaching Excellence. MacLean also serves as co-chair of the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies.

Dr. Rose M. Brewer is Professor, Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor, and past chair of the African American & African Studies Department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Professor Brewer also holds affiliated appointments in the Departments of Sociology and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. She received her M.A and Ph.D degrees in Sociology from Indiana University, and did post-doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. She has written extensively on black families, race, class and gender, and public policy, publishing over 40 refereed journal articles, book chapters, and scholarly essays in these areas. She is the editor with Lisa Albrecht of Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances. She is also co-editor of Is Academic Feminism Dead?: Theory in Practice (New York University Press, 2000), with the Social Justice Group, Center for Advanced Feminist Studies, University of Minnesota. Her most recent co-authored book is The Color of Wealth (The New Press, 2006), which was selected as one of the top l0 books for 2006, receiving the Gustavus-Meyers Book Award for best books on bigotry and human rights.

Professor Brewer’s commitment to undergraduate education and her scholarly achievements have been widely recognized. She is one of ten University of Minnesota faculty recipients of the Morse-Alumni Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence and Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. She has also received the African American Learning Resources Center Award for Teaching Excellence, among numerous other awards. In 1999 she was inducted into the National Academy of Distinguished Teachers, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Professor Brewer has spent over a decade working on curriculum transformation and progressive pedagogy, and consults nationally on issues of race, class, and gender in the curriculum.

Rose Brewer defines herself as a scholar-activist. For over a decade, she has been a member of the board of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide. She has also served on the board of United for a Fair Economy, and is a founding member of the Black Radical Congress.

Readings available upon request

Glenda E. Gilmore is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and currently the John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Her new book Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights will appear in fall of 2007 from W. W. Norton & Company. Her book Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1986-1920 won Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, and the Heyman Prize. She has appeared frequently on NPR and in PBS Documentaries. Gilmore has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Radcliffe at Harvard University.

Cynthia "Mil" Duncan returned to the University of New Hampshire in the spring of 2004 as founding director of the Carsey Institute. Widely recognized for her research on rural poverty and changing rural communities, Duncan was a sociologist at UNH for 11 years before leaving to become director of the Ford Foundation’s Community and Resource Development Unit in 2000. At the Ford Foundation she was responsible for a team of national and international leaders in the community development, youth, and environmental fields. Duncan was the associate director of the Rural Economic Policy Program at the Aspen Institute prior to her former work at the University.

In 1999, Duncan published Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America, which received the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best book in Community and Urban Sociology. Duncan is the author of numerous book chapters and refereed articles. She received her PhD from the University of Kentucky in sociology and is a recipient of the University of Kentucky Department of Sociology Thomas R. Ford Distinguished Alumni Award. Duncan has a BA from Stanford University.

Michael Burawoy has studied industrial workplaces in different parts of the world -- Zambia, Chicago, Hungary and Russia -- through participant observation. In his different projects he has tried to cast light -- from the standpoint of the workplace -- on the nature of postcolonialism, on the organization of consent to capitalism, on the peculiar forms of working class consciousness and work organization in state socialism, and on the dilemmas of transition from socialism to capitalism. During the 1990s he studied post Soviet decline as “economic involution”: how the Russian economy was driven by the expansion of a range of intermediary organizations operating in the sphere of exchange (trade, finance, barter, new forms of money), and how the productive economy recentered on households and especially women. No longer able to work in factories, most recently he has turned to the study of his own workplace – the university – to consider the way sociology itself is produced and then disseminated to diverse publics. Over the course of his research and teaching, he has developed theoretically driven methodologies that allow broad conclusions to be drawn from ethnographic research and case studies. These methodologies are represented in Global Ethnography a book coauthored with 9 graduate students, which shows how globalization can be studied "from below" through participation in the lives of those who experience it. Throughout his sociological career he has engaged with Marxism, seeking to reconstruct it in the light of his research and more broadly in the light of historical challenges of the late 20th and early 21st. centuries.

LECTURE POWERPOINTS

Marx meets Bourdieu 

Gramsci meets Bourdieu

Burawoy meets Bourdieu

Fanon meets Bourdieu 

De Beauvoir meets Bourdieu

Bourdieu Inherits Mills

READINGS (note that that these are works in progress, discussion papers rather than finished products.)

JOEL ANDREAS is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, where studies political contention and social change in contemporary China. His recent book, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class (2009), analyzes the contentious process through which old and new elites coalesced during the decades following the 1949 Communist Revolution. He is currently investigating changing relations between managers and workers in Chinese factories between 1949 and the present.