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The Cross-Country/Cross-Class Drives of Don Draper/Dick Whitman: Examining Mad Men’s Hobo Narrative
No full textThis article examines how the critically acclaimed television show Mad Men (2007-2015) sells romanticized working-class representations to middle-class audiences, including contemporary cable subscribers. The television drama’s lead protagonist, Don Draper, exhibits class performatively in his assumed identity as a Madison Avenue ad executive, which is in constant conflict with his hobo-driven born identity of Dick Whitman. To fully examine Draper/Whitman’s cross-class tensions, I draw on the American literary form of the hobo narrative, which issues agency to the hobo figure but overlooks the material conditions of homelessness. I argue that the hobo narrative becomes a predominant but overlooked aspect of Mad Men’s period presentation, specifically one that is used as a technique for self-making and self-marketing white masculinity in twenty-first century U.S. cultural productions
‘Labor Rights Are Human Rights’: An Interview with Maina Kiai, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association
No full textAlthough the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association among its thirty articles, more than sixty years elapsed before working people’s rights to form unions and assemble was accorded attention by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The omission of worker rights’ issues reflects a global international perspective that historically has not embraced workplace rights within the larger human rights framework. The UNHRC’s appointment of a Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association in 2011 marked a noteworthy step in broadening the dialogue. Special Rapporteur Maina Kiai has strongly argued that a first step toward addressing the harsh effects of globalization on millions of workers around the world begins with the eradication of the artificial distinction between labor rights and human rights. As Special Rapporteur, Kiai has underscored the centrality of the global working class, and argued that the ability of the working class to exercise fundamental workplace rights is a prerequisite for a broad range of other rights, whether economic, social, cultural or political
#TenureTrackHustle : Examining Academic Poverty of First-Generation Women of Color From an Intersectional Standpoint
No full textWomen of color in academia face challenging obstacles when it comes to surviving and thriving in the ivory tower. Enduring the grind of graduate school and immediately upon attaining a PhD, women of color are often burdened with heavy student loan debt, large teaching loads, unrealistic service expectations, experience microaggressions based on race, gender and class, isolation, alienation and other challenges which compound and negatively impact the path to tenure. Many of the challenges mentioned above often differ from those of their white and/or male counterparts in the academy. Throughout this article, we will examine the literature of Black women in academia, provide personal narratives situating these complexities, and root them all in the context of being Black and Woman in academia. The academy is a place we are rarely welcomed and constantly fighting to survive and thrive
Navigating Academia in the ‘Welfare-class’
No full textThe growing field of working-class studies provides a valuable narrative of the experiences of working-class academics, illustrates commonalities among such experiences and provides a space for dismantling the structural class-based disenfranchisement which proves detrimental to working-class scholars’ careers. Recent articles in The Journal of Working-class Studies have identified and named the specific experiences of alienation faced by working-class scholars, which include issues of financial disenfranchisement, issues of taste, accent, and ‘respectability’ (Attfield 2016), issues of ‘passing’, the imposter syndrome, and feelings of class betrayal (Warnock 2016). However, as Nicola Wilson (2016) and others have noted, ‘working-class is a fluid category and grouping’. For many scholars living in or emerging from a background of poverty, the term ‘working-class’ is limited. The term ‘welfare-class’ more appropriately describes the experience of some poor and welfare-reliant scholars. Considering the welfareclass as a distinct category within the working or poor classes, this article documents some of the specific experiences of alienation which pertain to being welfare-class in academia by focusing on the lived experiences of the authors, two academics at postgraduate and postdoctoral level. The article aims to contribute to the representation of poor and welfare-class academics among the growing body of autobiographical and autoethnographic knowledge (Warnock 2016) in working-class studies
Conceptualizing Critical Friendship as a Protective Measure in Academia
No full textCritical friendship is often used in the field of education to refer to relationships based on support and critical critique of professional practice. However, we posit that critical friendship has the potential as both a protective measure and mode of functional support for individuals negotiating the lived experiences and consequences of being working-class in the academy. Based on the auto-ethnographic narratives of two self-defined working-class doctoral students living and working in Ontario, Canada, we find that (mis)perceptions of incompetence; negotiating the academy as women; income, debt, and the tensions this creates result in the need for this redefined understanding of critical friendship
Organizing Working-Class Academics: A Collective History
No full textIn 2008, the Association of Working-Class Academics was founded in upstate New York by three former members of the Working-Class/Poverty-Class Academics Listserv. The Association had three goals: advocate for WCAs, build organizations on campuses that would support both working-class college students and WCAs, and support scholarship on issues relevant to class and higher education. The Association grew from a small handful to more than 200 members located in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Germany. In 2015, it was formally merged with the Working-Class Studies Association, and continues there as a special section for WCSA members. This is our collective account of the organization, told through responses to four key questions. We hope this history will provide insight and lessons for anyone interested in building similar organizations
Blockades, Barricades, and Barriers: Accessing and Navigating Academia from a Multi-Marginalized Positionality
No full textThis article is an autoethnographic account of a gender-queer, working-class, woman of color scholar’s venture into academia. Through an analysis of race and class violence compounded by gender and first-generation college student status, the author recounts the impact of intersectional identities on both their entry into higher education and their progression through graduate school. The author grapples with the isolation derived from engaging graduate students of color from economically privileged backgrounds. Similarly, they delve into finding community among white working-class academics and having to contend with whiteness and unexamined racial privilege. Further, definitions of work and productivity on the academic landscape are thoroughly examined as well as how a class-based consciousness shaped their professional trajectory
Self-interlacing polynomials II: Matrices with self-interlacing spectrum
No full textAn matrix is said to have a self-interlacing spectrum if its eigenvalues , , are distributed as follows: A method for constructing sign definite matrices with self-interlacing spectrum from totally nonnegative ones is presented. This method is applied to bidiagonal and tridiagonal matrices. In particular, a result by O. Holtz on the spectrum of real symmetric anti-bidiagonal matrices with positive nonzero entries is generalized
Semilinear preservers of the immanants in the set of the doubly stochastic matrices
No full textLet denote the symmetric group of degree and denote the set of all -by- matrices over the complex field, \IC. Let \chi: S_n\rightarrow \IC be an irreducible character of degree greater than of . The immanant \dc: M_n \rightarrow \IC associated with is defined by \dc(X) = \sum_{\sigma \in S_n} \chi(\sigma) \prod_{j=1}^n X_{j\sigma(j)} , \quad X = [X_{jk}] \in M_n. Let be the set of all -by- doubly stochastic matrices, that is, matrices with nonnegative real entries and each row and column sum is one. We say that a map from into \begin{itemize} \item is semilinear if for all and for all real number such that ; \item preserves if for all . \end{itemize} We characterize the semilinear surjective maps from into that preserve \dc, when the degree of is greater than one
From convergence in measure to convergence of matrix-sequences through concave functions and singular values
No full textSequences of matrices with increasing size naturally arise in several areas of science, such as, for example, the numerical discretization of differential and integral equations. An approximation theory for sequences of this kind has recently been developed, with the aim of providing tools for computing their asymptotic singular value and eigenvalue distributions. The cornerstone of this theory is the notion of approximating classes of sequences (a.c.s.), which is also fundamental to the theory of generalized locally Toeplitz (GLT) sequences, and hence to the spectral analysis of PDE discretization matrices. Drawing inspiration from measure theory, here it is introduced a class of functions which are proved to be complete pseudometrics inducing the a.c.s.\ convergence. It is also shown that each of these pseudometrics gives rise to a natural isometry between the spaces of GLT sequences and measurable functions. Furthermore, it is highlighted that the a.c.s.\ convergence is an asymptotic matrix version of the convergence in measure, thus suggesting a way to obtain matrix theory results from measure theory results