board and staff
board:
STANLEY ARONOWITZ is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center, where he is Director of The Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work. He has taught at Staten Island Community College, University of California-Irvine, University of Paris, Columbia University, and University of Wisconsin. After working in metalworking factories in New York and New Jersey, Aronowitz became a union organizer for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' Union. He is Founding Editor of Social Text and Situations, was Book Review Editor of Social Policy, and serves on the Editorial Board of Ethnography; Cultural Critique. He has authored and edited 23 books, including False Promises (1973), Science as Power (1988), Roll Over Beethoven (1993), How Class Works (2003), Just Around the Corner: The Paradox of the Jobless Recovery (2005) and Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006). He edited and wrote the introduction for a 4-volume critical reception of C.Wright Mills (2004), and is currently writing a biography of Mills.
RODERICK BUSH is an associate professor of Sociology at St. John's University in New York City. He is a recent Ph.D. after many years in the movement for Black liberation and social change. In 1984 he published an edited volume, The New Black Vote: Politics and Power in Four American Cities. This was followed by We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century, New York University Press, (1999) and The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line (Temple University Press, 2009). He is currently working with Melanie E.L. Bush on a book entitled Tensions in the “American” Dream: The Imperial Nation Confronts the Liberation of Nations to be published by Temple University Press in 2010. He has been a member of the Movement for African American Unity, the Congress of African People, the Student Organization for Black Unity/Youth Organization for Black Unity, the African Liberation Support Committee, the Revolutionary Workers League (M-L), and the Black Radical Congress.
ERIC CANEPA was Director of the Socialist Scholars Conference and then of Left Forum from 2001 until 2006. He was Coordinator of “Manifestivity,” the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto held in New York City in 1998. He has published several articles on left politics within East Germany. As a musician, he has been artistic director of Spazio Musica Antica in Florence, Italy and has played numerous concerts on harpsichord in the U.S., Belgium, Germany, and Italy. His musicological work has focused on problems of rhythm in 12th - 14th-century music as well as the strategies through which medieval music theory legitimized new practices. He now resides in Florence, Italy.
NANCY HOLMSTROM is Emerita Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers – Newark, and a longtime socialist and feminist activist and scholar. She has published numerous articles on core concepts of social/political philosophy including freedom, exploitation, rationality and women's nature/human nature. She has edited The Socialist Feminist Project: A Reader in Theory and Politics, coedited Not for Sale: In Defense of Public Goods and co-authored Capitalism For & Against: A Feminist Debate (Cambridge 2011).
JAMIE MCCALLUM is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Middlebury College. In past lives he has been a labor organizer, a journalist, and a trade union researcher.
LORRAINE C. MINNITE teaches public policy at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, she taught political science at Barnard College, and served as Research Director for Project Vote, a national non-partisan organization that works to increase voting among low-income Americans. She is the author and co-author of two books on U.S. electoral politics, Keeping Down the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters, (with Frances Fox Piven and Margaret Groarke), published by the New Press in 2009, and The Myth of Voter Fraud, published by Cornell University Press in 2010.
CATHERINE (CATHY) MULDER is an assistant professor of economics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice-CUNY and also teaches in the Masters of Labor Studies program at CUNY’s Murphy Institute. She specializes in labor economics and political economy. A former cable splicer for the telephone company, Cathy has been a worker advocate and labor activist for over 30 years. Because of her roots, she now dedicates her research, teaching, and service to improving workers’ rights and their conditions of employment. Released in 2009 by Routledge Publishers, her book, Unions and Class Transformation: The Case of the Broadway Musiciansdetails the role a union can take in providing a democratic workplace. Her article, “Wal-Mart’s Role in Capitalism,” appeared in the April 2011 edition ofRethinking Marxism. She is currently compiling case studies of alternatives to capitalist workplaces for a future book.
DONNA MURCH is associate professor of history at Rutgers University and co-director of the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (2010-2012) and the Black Atlantic lecture series. Her teaching and research specializations are postwar U.S. history, modern African American history, and twentieth-century urban studies. Professor Murch has published several scholarly articles and has recently completed a book entitled Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, which received the Phillis Wheatley award in 2011. Professor Murch is currently researching a new book on crack cocaine, informal economy, and the War on Drugs in the 1980s and 1990s.
FRANCES FOX PIVEN is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center. Her books include Regulating the Poor (1972, updated 1993, co-authored with Richard Cloward), a historical and theoretical analysis of the role of welfare policy in the economic and political control of the poor and working class; Poor Peoples' Movements (1977), which analyzes the political dynamics through which insurgent social movements sometimes compel significant policy reforms; Why Americans Don't Vote (1988; updated as Why Americans Still Don't Vote in 2000) analyzes of the role of electoral laws and practices in disenfranchising large numbers of working class and poor citizens; and The War at Home (2004), which examines the domestic causes and consequences of the foreign wars launched by the Bush administration. Most recently, in Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, Piven examines the interplay of disruptive social movements and electoral politics in generating the political force for egalitarian reform in American history.
ROB ROBINSON is a Special Adviser to the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights. He is co-founder of the Take Back the Land National Movement and a member of the US Human Rights Network. Rob spent two and a half years, homeless in Miami and ten months in a New York City homeless shelter. He eventually escaped his cycle of homelessness and has been in the housing movement in New York City since 2007. In the fall of 2009, Rob was chosen to be chairperson for the first ever official visit of a UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing. Rob has worked with homeless populations in Budapest Hungary and Berlin Germany. He is connected with housing movements in South Africa and Brazil. He is a member of a social justice media collective which produces and airs a monthly radio show over WBAI in New York City called Global Movements Urban Struggles.
HOBART SPALDING is retired as Professor of History from the City University of New York (CUNY). He focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean, specializing in working class and labor history, and has published widely in both fields. He sits on the editorial board of several publications, most notably Socialism and Democracy.
RICHARD D. WOLFF is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, the City University of New York, the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and the Brecht Forum in New York City. His publications, current research, and teaching concentrate on analyzing the global capitalist crisis and developing Marxian economic theory. In 2009, he produced a documentary film entitled Capitalism Hits the Fan and a book entitled Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. Together with his frequent co-author, Stephen Resnick, he also published New Departures in Marxian Theory (Routledge Publishers: London and New York, 2006) and Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR (Routledge Publishers: London and New York, 2002). He serves on the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism. His work can be accessed at www.rdwolff.com
JULIA WRIGLEY is a Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Class Politics and Public Schools and Other People's Children, as well as articles on domestic workers, class inequalities, and the political economy of education. She recently published (with Joanna Dreby) a study of fatalities and safety in childcare in American Sociological Review. She is currently working on a study of relationships between children, mothers, and children's caregivers and issues related to class dynamics in caregiving relationships.
staff:
SETH ADLER, Conference Coordinator was a founder of the national Jobs With Peace Campaign and is a long time peace and justice activist. He taught courses in Sociology, Community Studies, and Political Economy at the University of California at Santa Cruz and at New College of California and now teaches Social Movements/Civic Participation at Pace. He recently received his Ph.D in sociology from UC Santa Cruz and his most recent published article is on unconscious politics, alienation on the left, and prospects for left unity. He was a single parent for many years and a jazz, classical and soul/rhythm & blues musician and composer.
