The 31st Annual Southwest Labor Studies Conference will meet together with the Labor and Working Class History Association at the University of California at Santa Barbara on May 5,6 and 7, 2005. This joint conference aims to bring together unions, universities and social justice groups around the general theme:
Labor in Protest: The Legacy of the 1960s for the U.S. Labor Movement
All topics related to labor are welcome but we especially welcome proposals on the impact of the1960s on the labor movement in the ensuing decades of the twentieth century. This includes the subjects of women's liberation, farmworker organizing, organized labor against the war, organizing efforts in unions and working class communities by radicals and revolutionaries, union reform efforts of the 1970s, social policy and poverty programs, the national strike wave of the early 1970s, the rise of labor, ethnic and gender studies in universities, the rise of student unionism, the coming of the New Labor History, the rise of the Right in the 1970s, labor links to the African American freedom struggle, new ethnic and gender leadership in the AFL-CIO, changes in AFL-CIO labor policies for Latin America and Europe, new tactics in labor organizing, deindustrialization, plant closures and outsourcing. Proposals may also include the use of song, poetry, film, dramatic readings and audiovisual material.
Proposals for panels should include a one-page summary, with a list of presenters and their topics, and brief bios or vitas. Workshops should include ample time for audience response and participation. We encourage informal presentations, and discourage the reading of papers.
Contact Information: Please send your proposals by December 15, 2004 to co-chairs Don Watson (SWLSA) at dwlabor@earthlink.net and Nancy Gabin (LAWCHA) at Ngabin@sla.purdue.edu. Submitters will be contacted by January 15, 2005.
For questions on the conference site, contact the local coordinator at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Zaragosa Vargas, at Vargas@history.ucsb.edu.