I’m sitting here in Lehigh Valley airport in Allentown waiting to board the first leg of my trip to San Francisco.  I was reminded why I chose to fly out of LV and not Philly: no waiting in line, free WiFi, and a calm waiting area.  This is the way I want to start off my day–especially if I have to be in a plane for this long. 

I decided to go through my carry-ons just to see what I actually brought.  Here’s the main inventory:

• camera
• lots of pens
• notebooks
• union contract
• conference schedule
• laptop (obviously)
• web cam
• headset
• books
  • Democracies to Come  (shameless, I know)
  • Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinski
  • Don’t Think of an Elephant, by George Lakoff
  • Academic Collective Bargaining , ed. Ernst Benjamin and Michael Mauer
  • Rhetoric: A User’s Guide, by John Ramage
  • Emergent Publics, by Ian Angus
  • Communists Like Us, by Toni Negri and Felix Guattari
  • Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only, by Linda Brodkey
• June 2008 issue of CCC

Yes, that’s actually what’s in my bags.

Well, CCCCs here I come…rrr…actually not until tomorrow morning.  I’ve still got to finish packing, but it’s about time to call it a night.  

I’m quite excited about our panel and the labor caucus meeting for sure.  I’m also going to be playing around with blogging and podcasting from the CCCCs.  Blogging for sure.  Podcasting if I can get things up and running without too much hassle.  So, stay tuned.  Hopefully I’ll be able to cajole Amy, Mysti, Moe, Seth, Rachel, and others to post a little to our comp/rhet blog as well.  

In the meantime, here’s what I’m looking forward to:

NWS San Francisco Bay Area/Monterey, CA Zone Forecast: San Francisco County

Tonight…Mostly clear. Lows in the mid 30s to lower 40s. West winds 5 to 15 mph.  Wednesday…Mostly sunny. Highs in the mid 50s to lower 60s. West winds 5 to 10 mph. Wednesday Night…Mostly clear. Lows in the upper 30s to mid 40s. West winds 5 to 15 mph. Thursday…Partly cloudy. Highs near 60. West winds 5 to 10 mph. Thursday Night…Mostly clear. Lows in the 40s. West winds 5 to 15 mph. Friday…Mostly sunny. Highs in the upper 50s to mid 60s. Friday Night…Mostly clear. Lows in the 30s to upper 40s.

CCCCs is in San Francisco this week!

Yup, in just a few days I’ll be joining my agitating (in a good way!) composition pals in San Francisco for CCCCs.  I can’t wait to get there!  Not only am I totally excited about my panel, I am looking forward to helping reignite the CCCCs Labor Caucus!  And, how convenient is this, the Labor Caucus meeting is immediately following our panel…hmmmm, how did that happen?

Here’s the full description of our panel…come out if you can!

Labor Rhetoric and Academic Organizing: Possibilities and Predicaments

Session: D.22 on Mar 12, 2009 from 3:15 PM to 4:30 PM

As a field, Composition/Rhetoric attends carefully to academic labor issues, primarily regarding contingent faculty. This session highlights the limits of this focus and advocates for further action towards labor equity/justice in academia. Speakers articulate an array of labor problems, ranging from the importance of composition theory in staffing writing courses, to the abuse of immigrant labor on college campuses, and call for more aggressive, multi-layered (curricular, departmental, university-wide) labor organizing in response.

Amy Lynch-Biniek:

“When Teaching Is Generic: Connecting Composition Theory to Staffing Practices”

Administrators devalue Composition theory in order to justify staffing practices. If knowledge of Composition theory is unnecessary, if teaching becomes a generic skill, then courses may be cheaply staffed with graduate students and temporary employees who may have little knowledge of Composition. Consequently, pedagogy is less likely grounded in strong theoretical rationale. I argue that one tactic in a larger strategy for altering labor practices and improving Composition teaching is reasserting the essential role of Composition theory to composition teaching.

Seth Kahn:

“‘If I Don’t Do It, Nobody Will’”: Writing Program Faculty Fulfilling Management Responsibilities”

Growing numbers of management and shrinking numbers of full-time faculty positions significantly impact Writing Program faculty and administrators in two ways: (1) the well-documented deflection of resources away from faculty; and despite growing numbers of managers, (2) Writing Program faculty/administrators doing more management work. This presentation analyzes the second point, contending that writing instruction and program administration suffer when faculty take on management responsibilities, and that academic unions need to take a stronger stand on enabling faculty to concentrate on faculty work.

Rachel Riedner

“Immigrant Labor and Universities”

While university communities are an imagined community of students and faculty engaged in the project of education, these communities increasingly include immigrant workers. Immigrant workers are constructed to be both inside and outside the university: inside insofar as they reproduce the conditions of education for the university community, and outside insofar as they are not imagined as part of the community. This paper argues that with contracting immigrant labor comes a contracting out of community responsibility, resigning service and immigrant employees to invisibility in educational communities.

Kevin Mahoney

“Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures”

In the 1990s, labor conditions and labor organizing in higher education took center stage in rhetoric and composition. However, the field has not sought to deepen that project significantly through explicit rhetorical instruction in labor organizing and advocacy. Focusing on higher education labor organizing, this paper argues for a curricular project connecting explicit instruction in rhetorics of advocacy, new undergraduate majors in comp/rhet, and the field’s investment in critical citizenship.

Mary Boland

“Contracting Competing Interests: Unionizing and the Preservation of Academic Freedom.”

More and more academic workers are looking to unions to preserve their professional integrity. Unionizing can pose problems because the guild ideology that justifies academic freedom runs counter to the egalitarianism that underwrites unionization. The risk is that we may unintentionally redefine the terms of work in a manner that undercuts academic freedom. I illustrate how unionizing can generate competing rights among classes of laborers and jeopardize faculty freedoms and suggest that compositionists are uniquely situated to help anticipate these pitfalls.

Respondent: Eileen Schell

That’s right folks, like a phoenix here comes the CCCCs Labor Caucus once again.  If you are at CCCCs (or in SF) and want to attend, check out the event listing on facebook:

Some years ago, Janet Atwill, Don Lazere and others began organizing a Labor Caucus within CCCC. In the meantime, there’s been lots of great work on labor issues in our field—temporary/adjunct faculty, gender/race/harassment, valuing administrative work, tenure and promotion, and so on.

However, the current economic climate and aggressively anti-labor strategies/tactics so pervasive both within and beyond the academy have prompted a group of us to believe that it’s time to resurrect the Labor Caucus. Many of us are unionized already, and can benefit from increased networking and collaboration across the country. Others want and need to be unionized, and can benefit from the support and expertise of current unions/union-organizers. And finally, we believe that the CCCC can and must do more to emphasize the labor aspects of our work to faculty, administrators, managers, and broader public interest groups—work that the Labor Caucus would most certainly participate in.

As a first step towards (re)forming the Labor Caucus, we are hosting an Interest Meeting at the CCCC for any and all interested folks. The essentials—

Date: Thurs, March 12
Time: 5-7 pm
Location: Serrano Hotel, Golden Gate Room
405 Taylor St.

Hope to see you there.

Seth Kahn, on behalf of the CCCC Labor Caucus Resurrection Interest Group