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At Prescott College, learners can create a self-designed independent research (low residency) program in working-class studies.
Here is how the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, the first center in the country focusing on issues of work and class, defines working-class studies:
Working-Class Studies is an interdisciplinary field that emphasizes the political and cultural meanings of working-class life, highlights the relationship between class and other kinds of cultural difference, and is committed to bridging the usual gap between the humanities and the community.
It is generally understood that the absence of discussion of the working class between the end of WWII and the early 1980s was largely the result of the Cold War, progressive legislation, and the lessening of economic inequality in America. Conversely, the massive erosion of economic security in the last 15 years—job security, health security, retirement security, and purchasing power—brought into question the expanding distribution of wealth and power and issues of class (poverty, equality, opportunity, and deprivation). In addition, economic restructuring and globalization are changing the landscape of class in the U.S. and worldwide. Workers who believed themselves to be solidly middle class have found themselves out of work, with significantly reduced incomes, or racing to manage two or three part-time jobs. Knowledge and service workers make up an ever-increasing portion of the labor force. Factory and computer industry are moving out of the U.S. and Europe and into developing countries, creating both more fluid national economic boundaries and an increased sense of competition. These changes in the structure and experiences of class and work make the study of working-class culture, labor organizing, and the meaning of work essential to understanding and political intervention in a shifting global economy.
Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University
In the Master of Arts Program a degree in working-class studies may take on a broad examination of the history and culture of the working class within a particular geographic or date-specific location. A program in working-class studies may also be an emphasis within a broader program of study, in areas such as literature or art, history or philosophy, or economics or political science.
Potential courses include: Class in the United States; Class and Culture; History of Work in the United States; Women and Work in the United States; Working-Class Literature; Working-Class Art; Intersections of Class and Gender; The Social Construction of Categories of Difference; Labor History; The Working-Class Scholar; “Teaching Working-Class Studies” (based on the work of Sherry Linkon and the CWCS); Radical Literature of the 1930s; History of Organized Labor; or any other topic that examines class, the working or poverty class, or labor history.
Last updated February 17, 2004.
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