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Upcoming ILR Events

Please be aware that, due to public health concerns regarding COVID-19 (novel coronavirus), most campus events are being offered virtually.

Becoming Unpopular: Conspiracy and Political Struggle Today

AK Thompson presents, "Becoming Unpopular: Conspiracy and Political Struggle Today" Conspiring literally means breathing together. Historically, the term implied co-implications that were at odds with the oaths demanded by sovereign power. It seems therefore that conspiracy should be a central reference point for those committed to revolutionary politics. Nevertheless, the dominant forms in which conspiracy is encountered today suggest a repudiation of collectivity and collective action. Caught now in an interregnum in which the conditions that enabled the historical development of mass politics can no longer be presupposed, however, Thompson argues that revisiting the history of political conspiracy may paradoxically suggest a means by which those politics might yet be renewed. This investigation is part of a new book project entitled Becoming Unpopular, which is focused on the historical development and hidden promise of unpopular political modes including conspiracy, contagion, absolution, despair, and death. In each case, the designation “unpopular” signals both that which is socially maligned and that which advances a conception of “the people” at odds with prevailing orthodoxies. AK Thompson is a movement-based scholar, an award-winning educator, and the author and editor of numerous books including, most recently, Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt. Alongside his scholarly contributions to journals like Social Movement Studies and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, he has also been featured in popular venues including Boston Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Sponsored by the Society for the Humanities, the Institute for Comparative Modernities, PM Press, the Department of Global Labor and Work (ILR), the Department of Government, and the Department of History. Find more about the event on Facebook: Becoming Unpopular Free and open to the public, reception to follow

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Becoming Unpopular: Conspiracy and Political Struggle Today

Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Matthew Johnson

Matthew Johnson, Duke Management Practices, Workplace Injuries, and the Effects of Government Safety Regulations (with Nick Bloom, David I. Levine, and Alison Pei) Abstract: Workplace injuries are a massive economic burden, yet they persist across a wide range of workplaces. Why? Reducing injury risk entails financial and opportunity cost, but it may also require adoption of management practices that are slow to diffuse. Linking confidential data from the Census Bureau with data on workplace injuries, we find that establishments with more structured management practices (monitoring production, setting targets, and establishing incentives) have substantially lower injury rates, a relationship that holds within industries and within establishments over time. We then examine how this variation in management influences the effects of government safety regulations on workers and firms. Enforcement inspections by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration reduce injuries, but only at establishments with few structured management practices. Inspections also lead to an increase in establishments’ use of structured management practices. Inspections have no detectable effect on establishments’ survival, investment, or productivity.

Localist event image for Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Matthew Johnson
Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Matthew Johnson

Labor Advocacy Career Fair

Discover internships and full-time opportunities with labor unions, law firms representing unions and/or individuals, and other organizations dedicated to workers’ rights. The Labor Advocacy Career Fair (formerly known as the Social Justice Career Fair) is open to all Ithaca-based Cornell students and will be a featured event during the university's annual Union Days series, sponsored by the ILR School.

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Labor Advocacy Career Fair

Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Guo Xu

Guo Xu, Berkeley

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Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Guo Xu

The Left in China

Ralf Ruckus will present central arguments from the book The Left in China. A Political Cartography (Pluto Press, 2023): All over the world, progressive forces debate the nature of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While some consider them to be socialist, others recognize the critical role of the current CCP government in facilitating capitalist exploitation and the suppression of social struggles. Often, little or no attention is given to leftwing oppositional movements and groups in the PRC. Since the founding of the PRC in 1949, changing class divisions have led to waves of social protests by workers, migrants, and women, which inspired several generations of leftwing opposition against CCP rule. The dialectic of social struggles and leftwing oppositional movements has shaped the history of the PRC, from the socialist build-up in the 1950s to the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the democracy movements in the 1970s and 1980s, the resistance of the socialist working class against capitalist restructuring in the 1990s and 2000s, and the struggles of migrant workers and women since. This event is co-sponsored by the East Asia Program.

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The Left in China

Labor Economics Workshop: Melanie Wasserman

Melanie Wasserman, UCLA

Localist event image for Labor Economics Workshop: Melanie Wasserman
Labor Economics Workshop: Melanie Wasserman

Graduate Conference: Agrarian Studies, Climate Change and the Future of Work

The future of work is hot. Literally. Unpredictable seasons, droughts, floods, warming temperatures, rising seas, and a host of other climatic factors are changing what work is, what it means, and what it does to the body. These effects are unevenly felt across geographies, forms of difference, and inequalities. The impacts of climate change – extreme temperatures and changing agricultural cycles - on agrarian environments demand new frameworks to analyze work in the agrarian present and future. We invite abstracts that conceptualize climate change as a problem of work. Rather than restricting a changing climate to new weather patterns, shifting topographies, and techno-fixes, this conference opens a conversation to think about climate change through other anthropogenic changes, such as sociopolitical and economic transformations. This graduate conference will bring graduate students across disciplines to speak on a variety of topics including agrarian change, urban and rural relations, infrastructural transitions, uneven geographies of risk, and the politics of scale and temporality. We invite graduate students to send abstracts of up to 250 words to hak78@cornell.edu by March 1st, 2024.

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Graduate Conference: Agrarian Studies, Climate Change and the Future of Work

Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Francesca Truffa

Francesca Truffa, Stanford

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Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Francesca Truffa

Labor Economics Workshop: Trevon Logan

Trevon Logan, Ohio State

Localist event image for Labor Economics Workshop: Trevon Logan
Labor Economics Workshop: Trevon Logan

Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Edoardo Teso

Edoardo Teso, Northwestern

Localist event image for Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Edoardo Teso
Joint Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Edoardo Teso

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