Advocacy & Activism
Mission
By organizing, strategizing, mobilizing, and educating, advocates and activists are currently helping to bring about important social, political, and cultural changes throughout the world. We define “activism” and “social movements” as collective action to exert pressure on centers of power in order to remedy grievances and felt injustices.
While this program is committed to understanding and analyzing all kinds of activism, it has a special interest in movements of populations that are socially, culturally, and economically marginalized. From migrant Latinos advocating for labor rights in the US to indigenous people mobilizing in Ecuador, from transnational movements for fair trade to low-income people right here in Syracuse organizing to advocate for themselves, this program seeks to analyze the social forces that generate, sustain, and weaken social movements, and to grasp the impacts such movements are having on the modern world.
We have a special interest in understanding the complex relationships between grassroots actors, nongovernmental actors, and states at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. We also have a special interest in working to deepen and enrich reflection and action at the interface between academic analysis and effective social action, through direct, institutional, and extra-institutional processes.
The PARCC Labor Studies Series
Friday, March 29, 2013 - "The Crisis of Academic Labor: Grad Students, Adjuncts and the Making of the Low-Wage University." Over the last four decades, American universities have increasingly shifted their academic labor force toward a pool of part-time and underpaid adjuncts, graduate students, and a whole variety of hybrid non-tenure track faculty. Today, according to the American Association of University Professors, nearly 70% of faculty members are non-tenure track, characterized by low wages, difficult working conditions and negligible job security. Meanwhile, universities continue to raise student tuition while spending exorbitant amounts on administration salaries and building construction.How has this happened? How do the eroding conditions for academic labor mirror wider trends in American capitalism toward low-wage job growth and increasing inequality? How have these trends affected Syracuse University? How are technological trends and new teaching platforms transforming the conditions of academic labor? What are the prospects for graduate students working toward a career in academia? What is the future of tenure? Finally, and most important, how have these trends been resisted through adjunct and grad student unionization and other forms of labor struggle? How does Syracuse University's status as a private institution structure the legal environment of such struggles? This workshop and event on academic labor will explore such questions and provide a venue at Syracuse for discussion and debate by all those concerned with the state of academic labor. More >
Past Labor Studies Events
Taken for a Ride: Guestworkers in the U.S. | Sept. 1, 2011
- David Griffith, PhD, Professor of Anthropology at East Carolina University
- Rachel Micah-Jones, JD, Founder & Executive Director of Centro de los Derechos del Migrante
- Martin Davila Venegas, H-2B guestworker from Mexico
- Rebecca Fuentes, Director of the Workers Center of Central New York
Labor and Community Organizing | Oct. 28, 2011
- Janice Fine, PhD, Professor in the School of Labor & Management Relations at Rutgers University
- Ian MacDonald, PhD, Postdoc Fellow in the School of Industrial & Labor Relations, Cornell University
- Jeffrey Bellamy, Executive Director of Syracuse Alliance for a New Economy
- Mark Spadafore, Political Organizer for SEIU Local 1199
Solidarity Across Borders: New Developments in Labor Transnationalism | Mar. 20, 2012
- Jamie McCallum, PhD, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Middlebury College
- Robin Alexander, JD, Director of International Affairs of the United Electrical Workers Union
- Benedicto Martinez Orozco, Co-President of the Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT)
Public Employees Under Siege? The Case of Public School Teachers | Apr. 18, 2012
- Rebecca Givan, PhD, Asst. Professor at the School of Industrial & Labor Relations, Cornell University
- Pauline Kinsella, Executive Director of New York State United Teachers (NYSUT)
- Douglas Gerhardt, JD, President of statewide school labor relations association (MASLA)