I've been neglecting this blog while trying to write a first draft of what will certainly be the longest and most ambitious (god that sounds pretentious) chapter of my dissertation this month.  This chapter covers roughly the same workers during the same period (plus six more years) at the same university that I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis about, and it's an interesting challenge both to find new archives and new things to say.  I am not really trained as a historian - all of my academic work has been in American Studies departments, and I sometimes feel like I use that as a crutch to not be a better historian than I am, so I am trying to work on that, and I'm trying to find things to say about a moment that strikes me as anticipatory of the present, that seems to echo with later struggles in really interesting ways.  But I know that it's lazy and bad history to use that as the only and/or primary way of talking about the moment I am looking at, and part of the challenge of this chapter and the two others I have written about service workers at the same campus is that I have to figure out more compelling ways to theorize these struggles and what they mean than what my first reaction to them was nine years ago when I first started learning about them, which was holy shit, this conjuncture is a lot like the present in really interesting ways.  So instead I get to talk about the "blue collar blues," about the proletarianization and organization of teaching assistants in the early 1970s, about the struggles of young service workers of color in the age of DRUM and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, about budget austerity during the long death of fordist compromise.  All of which is pretty fun.

So I have no idea if I am doing a good job, I haven't seen a bird in weeks, I feel profoundly cut off from organizing and radical work, and I have barely left the apartment in months, but I do feel like I have been more productive over the last six months than I have been since I started graduate school, and I suppose that's something, though not something I'm entirely thrilled about in the sense that I have never wanted to be the person who shrugs off organizing responsibilities or radical imperatives to sit in a room alone and write.

Anyway, apropos of nothing, here's a list of stuff I want to read but haven't had time to yet.  (In between writing fits I have been working my way through James Geschwender's book about the League, which is really interesting in part for how different it is from Georgakas and Surkin's treatment of more or less the same subject matter.)  Hat tips for these go to various people on various commodified social networks, some of whom I know and some of whom I do not.

Ed Emery, No Politics Without Inquiry!
Weaponize the Corpse!  Anti-Privatization Struggle at Sussex University
Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams
Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, "The Avant-garde of white supremacy"
Kathi Weeks, "Imagining Non-Work"
and several books piling up on my desk I am really excited about reading someday.

Instead I get to read through scab urbanist books written by scab management professors for the second time and figure out if seven and a half years of graduate school have improved my polemical skills at all.