HS10: Labor and American Political Development

Collaborative Goals

The goals of the working group are to: (1) Foster greater collaboration among faculty and graduate students working on issues broadly related to labor and American politics. Collaborations could include research papers bringing together two or more faculty and/or graduate students from different school; jointly organized research grant proposals; or the co-design and co-teaching of courses on Labor and American Politics at different campuses. (2) Provide a regularized opportunity and forum for participating faculty and graduate students to gain and provide feedback on their research projects and scholarly output, most importantly in the form of paper workshop meetings. We anticipate holding at least two of these workshops, inviting five to fifteen members or potential members of the working group and other researchers working on this issue to the Cornell and Syracuse campuses for one or two day events. One potential goal for long term collaboration would be to expand the number of participants and make this either an annual or twice-annual conference where primarily junior and mid-career scholars could present their work and receive valuable feedback. (3) One of the immediate goals of this new working group would be to arrange “brainstorming” meetings of the organizers for purposes of facilitating more in-depth and advance planning regarding collaborative research opportunities. This would be an opportunity for identifying promising avenues for collaboration and for identifying an expanded pool of potential participants. (4) If established as a new working group, these brainstorming meetings would lay the foundation for applying for additional research and Humanities Corridor grants as a continuing working group, allowing us to further expand the number of participants and possibly to organize a signature event.