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.
VIVEK CHIBBER was born in Delhi, India. He is a professor of sociology at New York University, where he has been since receiving his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1999. He is author of Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton: 2003), as well as articles on imperialism, Marxist theory, long-term historical change, and the political economy of development. He is associate editor of the Socialist Register, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Agrarian Change, Politics and Society, and other journals.
NANCY HOLMSTROM is Chair of the Philosophy Department 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 and coedited Not for Sale: In Defense of Public Goods.
JAMIE MCCALLUM studies Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and teaches in the Urban Studies department and the Center for Worker Education at Queens College. As an agitator for social justice, he's been a labor organizer in New York and California, and helped build worker-activist alliances before the WTO protest in Seattle in 1999. At parties, he is fond of telling people he's "working on a novel." This is his third year working with Left Forum.
LORRAINE MINNITE teaches American and urban politics at
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.
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.
WILLIAM TABB taught economics at Queens College and economics, political science and sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2004) and The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press, 2001).
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 atwww.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 Movemetns/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.