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Perpetual Shifting: An Experiential Exploration of Labor and the Academy and Why Work Matters
Abstract
Working-class studies and the experiences of working-class students are not often the focus of contemporary university courses. Relegated to the periphery, the study of labor is at best a gloss to other preoccupations of the classroom; this has a profound effect on both students and other community members who embody working-class identities and those who do not. Using an auto-ethnographical approach, this dissertation examines the effects of that oversight on students who inhabit multiple “class” spaces: the academy and the spaces of manual labor. An exploration of U.S. literary texts, primarily from the twentieth-century and both canonical and lesser-known, reveals a history of working class subjects who simultaneously confront the multiplicity of identities and marginalization that is part and parcel of participating in academic life. These literary “witnesses,” regardless of whether they speak from 1909 or 2014 (as in Jack London’s novel Martin Eden or Daisy Hernández’s memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed, respectively), directly address issues confronting working people today. Prioritizing these voices transforms the experiences and successes of working students, and allows us to “re”see the world and our local communities, which are constructed and maintained not by the things we often learn inside of the academy, but by a diverse group of humans often left out of it.
Subject Area
American literature|Ethnic studies|Transportation
Recommended Citation
Pawlenty, Linda J, "Perpetual Shifting: An Experiential Exploration of Labor and the Academy and Why Work Matters" (2022). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI29165322.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI29165322