Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor (Issue 14): Beyond the Picket Line: Academic Organizing after the Long NYU Strike

The fourteenth issue of *Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor* is now available online at http://cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/

“Beyond the Picket Line: Academic Organizing after the Long NYU Strike” features essays gathered by Michael Palm (Chair of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee at New York University), all of which address the implications of graduate worker activism for the future of higher education. The graduate union at NYU has the distinction of being the first to bargain a contract at a private university, and the first to see negotiations terminated by a private university administration. *Workplace 14* provides various critical accounts of the administration’s renunciation of the union, and a series of in-depth analyses of the strike that followed. Written by the strikers themselves—with one important contribution by a unionist at the City University of New York—these articles comprise one of our most urgent releases to date.

Contents include:

“Introduction to the Special Issue”
by Michael Palm

“The Future of Academia is On the Line: Protest, Pedagogy, Picketing, Performativity”
by Emily Wilbourne

“The Professionalizing of Graduate ‘Students’”
by Michael Gallope

“Making It Work: Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools” and the Unbearable Difference of GSOC”
by Elizabeth Loeb

“The NYU Strike as Case Study”
by David Schleifer

“Armbands, Arguments, Op-Eds, and Banner-Drops: Undergraduate Participation in a Graduate Employee Strike”
by Andrew Cornell

“Another University is Possible: Academic Labor, the Ideology of Scarcity, and the Fight for Workplace Democracy”
by Ashley Dawson

The issue also contains six new book reviews (edited by William Vaughn) as well as Wayne Ross’s *Workplace Blog.*

We are pleased to announce that Stephen Petrina (http://cust.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/petrina.html) has joined *Workplace* as a general editor. Stephen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia where he teaches courses in research methodology, curriculum theory, cultural studies, new media, and technology. His research explores the interconnections among cognition, emotion(s), and technology, concentrating especially on how we learn (technology) across the lifespan. Stephen was co-editor of *Workplace* 7.1, “Academic Freedom and IP Rights in an Era of the Automation and Commercialization of Higher Education” (http://www.cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/issue7p1/), and his recent articles have also appeared in *Technology & Culture*, *History of Psychology*, *History of Education Quarterly* and the *International Journal of Technology and Design Education*. Welcome Stephen!

Special thanks go to Stephen and to Franc Feng for their tremendous design work on the current issue. We welcome Franc as a member of the Workplace Collective.

We also want to express our gratitude to Julie Schmid for her continued editorial assistance.

Look for issues on “Mental Labor” (headed up by Steven Wexler) and “Academic Labor and the Law” (edited by Jennifer Wingard) in 2008.

(Please note that from this release forward, the journal will forgo the point system [1.1, 1.2, 2.1, etc.] and number according to our total collection of issues thus far. Although the last issue was 7.1 [the thirteenth release], we number this issue 14.)

Thanks for your continued support.

Solidarity,

Christopher Carter
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Oklahoma
Co-editor, *Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor*

E. Wayne Ross
Professor
Department of Curriculum Studies
University of British Columbia
http://web.mac.com/wayne.ross
Co-Editor, *Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor*

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