Get Organized: Building Academic Worker Power on and across Campuses (Presidential and Ethnography Caucus Session)

Session Submission Type: Professional Development Workshop

Abstract

This workshop’s co-facilitators include faculty who have been deeply engaged in recent unionization campaigns at several universities. Our goal is to equip participants with skills for organizing their own campuses—whether they are actively organizing or looking to start. Co-facilitators will offer key lessons learned from their own campaigns. In break-out groups, co-facilitators will discuss tactics they have employed in their organizing work, dialogue with participants about their own campaign status (i.e., want to start organizing, just getting started, working on established campaign), and outline plans for moving forward. Discussions will revolve around participants’ interests. Topics could include how to start a union campaign; campaign stages; organizing conversations; power-structure analysis; organizing for and after first contract; peer training and mentoring; direct action; coalition-building; overcoming campaign setbacks; and organizing against anti-union activities. All academic workers welcome. No experience necessary.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Ben Chappell, University of Kansas

Panelists

• Aaron Eddens, Grand Valley State University

• Daniel Birchok, University of Michigan-Flint

• Theresa A Kulbaga, Miami University-Hamilton

• Andaluna C Borcila, Michigan State University - MISU2 - Cana

Biographical Information

Ben Chappell is a Professor of American studies at the University of Kansas and a member of the contract negotiating team for United Academics of KU (AFT-AAUP). He is the author of two books on Mexican American cultural poetics and popular aesthetics, a co-editor of the journal American Studies and a special issue co-editor of the collection Chicanx/Latinx Studies and the University (forthcoming). In addition to organizing, Ben is pursuing an on-going critical university research project on navigating knowledge ideologies in the transition from faculty to administrative work.

Aaron Eddens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University. He is the author of Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa (University of California Press, 2024) and has been organizing academic workers since 2023.

Andaluna Borcila teaches culture and politics in MSU’s James Madison college. Her research moves across post-Cold War, post-communist, media, and memory studies. She has been organizing at MSU for many years and has worked on building the Union of Tenure System Faculty, serving on the organizing committee since its inception and in multiple roles up to and beyond union recognition. She is an At-Large E-Board member and serves on the collective bargaining committee.

Theresa A. Kulbaga (TK) is President of the Faculty Alliance of Miami, AAUP-AFT Local 375 and Professor of English at Miami University. She is the author (with Leland G. Spencer) of Campuses of Consent: Sexual and Social Justice in Higher Education (U Mass, 2019). Her essays on women’s autobiography, transnational feminism, and pedagogy appear in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Prose Studies, JAC, College English, and English Journal, among others.

Daniel Birchok is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan-Flint and President of the UMF AFT-AAUP, AFT Local 5671. His scholarly interests include Islamic history and practice in Southeast Asia, with a focus on the political and ethical subjectivities cultivated through Sufism and saint devotion in Indonesia.