At our board meeting in Atlanta, LAWCWA voted to provide up to $250 to help support other regional graduate student-organized and run labor and working class history conferences, as we supported the April 2014 Midwest Labor and Working Class History Conference, “Resistance and Remembrance: Collective Identities and the Uses of History.”
Two of the organizers of that successful gathering—Adam Mertz and John Terry–have produced the attached “Conference How-To Guide” to make it easy for others to organize. They’ve also included the call for papers and conference brochures to demystify the process of pulling off a successful regional conference. If you are interested in organizing such an effort in your region, please talk with some other LAWCHA grad students to see if they would like to be involved, review these materials, and contact Adam if you have questions after reviewing the attached materials: amertz2@uic.edu.
If you decide to move forward, please let LAWCHA know so we can provide contact info for grad student members in your region, by filling out the request at this link: //membership/ Our financial support will take the form of reimbursement for documented conference-related expenses such as room rentals, meals or receptions, etc.
Lastly, here’s what Adam and John say about the benefits of these regional grad conferences: “Above all, MLWCH represents an avenue for building solidarity—in scholarship, in teaching, and in activism. By organizing and attending several MLWCH Conferences, we’ve met many fellow grad students, educators, and activists. We still maintain contact with many of them. From these contacts, we have assembled panels for other conferences, we have provided feedback on each other’s research, we have distributed ideas for teaching, and we have alerted each other to current events in labor issues. As historians of workers, we should all cherish solidarity and seize upon this opportunity to foster greater collaboration. We sincerely hope that you host your own regional labor and working-class history conference and gain the same benefits that we have from our conference experiences.”
The board would love to see graduate students in other regions come together to share work, so we hope you will consider it! Faculty members: please alert graduate students to this opportunity.
Nancy MacLean
President, LAWCHA
Conference Guides and Examples
