Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The declining power of unions is one defining characteristic of civil societies in post-industrial, advanced capitalist countries. In the literature, structural changes in the economy, and variations in domestic institutional arrangements are identified as the most important factors to explain the weakened power of labor organizations. Workers today are not only a more heterogonous group in terms of their interests and income, but the lines that separate employers and employees are increasingly indistinct. Moreover, mobility of factors has trivialized the links between time and space, causing businesses to turn away from strict hierarchies and toward less centralized organizational structures. As a result of these new networks, it has never been more difficult to initiate collective action and build labor solidarity; however there have been notable instances of bargaining successes for labor. The successful 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike cost the entertainment industry billions. Within this context, we utilize original data provided by the WGA-West in order to understand the dynamics of the strike. Our focus is to understand the factors that explain the support of the members of the guild – an extremely diverse group – in terms of their income and concomitant roles in the industry as producers, directors, or actors. We end with a discussion of the generalizability of our findings to other countries and sectors.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The present study marks the first time that the day-to-day practices of citizen reporters are examined in an in-depth manner, to include the ways in which they avail themselves of sources and produce original news items. Moreover, the paper compares the methods and means of citizen reporters with those of their counterparts from the mainstream press. Data was gleaned from a series of reconstruction interviews in which reporters from Israeli citizen and mainstream news websites explained how they formulated their sampled items. The paper suggests a round-about version of the “news access” theory, whereby citizen journalists are hindered by their inferior access to news sources, unlike mainstream journalism, where the problem is the superior access of some of their sources to extensive and favored coverage. There are several symptoms for citizen reporters’ limited news access: their modest use of human sources; the high proportion of one-source items; their reluctance to interactively negotiate versions with sources; and the absence of established relations with most of their sources. Therefore, citizen reporters’ associations with sources tend to be ad hoc exchanges, rather than long-term role relationships. On the other hand, citizen reporters have adopted several mechanisms that help them make up for their comparably limited access. For example, they are much more likely to pursue stories at their own initiative. In addition, they tend to predicate their stories on firsthand witnessing, technical sources (mainly internet), personal acquaintances, and on their own experience.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: The Genocide of the Armenians almost a century ago in Turkey is now sliding into the past, but unanswered questions persist and cause frustration and anxiety: why did it happen? Why did the world let it happen? Why this terrible injustice? Justice has not been rendered, and Armenians cannot put their dead to rest. This obsession with the past keeps surfacing in their literature, reflecting the way they think and perceive the world. Denial of the crime by the perpetrators and their use of intrigue to secure allies and distort history fuel this obsession. Then, there is also the vague image of a lost homeland that kindles a sense of deprivation even in the most integrated or acculturated Armenian American. The latter phenomenon has grown deeper under the influence of the general trend in United States in the 1960s and 1970s to search for one’s roots, a sense of belonging, and an identity connected to the past, to history, and to the other members of the group. American culture of the time facilitated group affiliation and identification. The Armenian past was obviously associated with the massacres and deportations. The memory of that collective traumatic past thus became the source of self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-identity.
This paper will dwell briefly on the literature of the older generation Armenian American writers, such as David Kherdian, Peter Najarian, Diana Der Hovanessian, Hakob Karapents, Vahe Oshagan, and others, to trace the shaping of that identity and will then proceed to follow the quest for self-identity in the literature of the new generation writers, such as Leonardo Alishan, Carol Edgarian, Peter Balakian, Vickie Smith Foston, Mae M. Derdarian, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and others.
This paper will show how in some third-generation Armenian writers the Armenian component is gradually pulled out of a nebulous memory hole to become an important dimension in their self-identity and how in others the transmitted memory of images of suffering and death never did loosen its grip, imposing upon everyday life in this New World.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: The United States of America has featured prominently in Polish post-World War II life writing, including the period of communism (1945-1989). At that time, much context for the production and consumption of relevant works was determined by the activity of state propaganda which attempted to impose a negative image of “America” as the leader of the capitalist West. Interestingly, a large group of works from this period, recounting the authors’ travels to the U.S., tried to circumvent official control and present as “unbiased” a picture of the U.S. as possible. These attempts stemmed from the presence of a well-ingrained positive image of the U.S., rooted in the history of Polish economic migration, and also in the popular opposition to the imposed communist regime, linked with the perception of the U.S. as the force capable of stopping communist expansion worldwide. While the intensity of state anti-American propaganda varied, the positive valuation of the symbol of “America” among most Poles remained very strong throughout the period.
In this broad context, it seems that Polish writers’ accounts of travel to the U.S. can be meaningfully interpreted within the framework of Victor Turner’s treatment of pilgrimage as a liminoid phenomenon. Drawing on van Gennep’s concept of rites of passage involving separation, limen (margin), and reaggregation, Turner treats modern pilgrimage as a liminoid phenomenon, one in which, untypically for liminality, there is a strong element of voluntariness, but also as one which continues to include movement, departure from the usual structures, healing, renewal, and a re-consideration of core values. The concept of pilgrimage has been on occasion applied to secular travel to places of extraordinary importance. Given the symbolic significance of the U.S. for Poles in the communist Poland, it appears that Polish writers’ travels to the U.S., and the resulting accounts, can be justifiably interpreted in these terms.
Andrzej Kijowski (1928-1985) was in his time a leading Polish literary critic and prose writer. Opposed to communism, he frequently published in the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. In the early 1970s, he managed to travel to the U.S., invited by the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. He published an account of this journey in his 1982 Podroz na najdalszy zachod (Journey to the Farthest West). This paper aims to investigate Kijowski’s encounter with “America,” as depicted in this book, bringing to the interpretation notions of Kijowski’s political oppositionality, as well as an awareness of his writing for the home audience in the conditions of publication control by communist censorship. Additional information about his journey, including its pretravel and post-return phases, will be derived from Kijowski’s Diary, published posthumously in 1998 in the changed context of the post-communist Poland, as well as from relevant archival documents from the Iowa I.W.P. which I was able to review during my visit there earlier this year. It is hoped that this triangulation of sources can be particularly revealing regarding Kijowski’s experience of Polish-American culture crossing.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines two hemispheric “crossroads” traversed by a group of poets in the Americas in the 1960s and 1980s. The site of the first set of crossroads is _El Corno Emplumado/ The Plumed Horn_, a bilingual literary magazine that began in 1962 in Mexico City, edited by North American poet Margaret Randall and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón. _Corno_ sought to initiate a transnational literary subculture of poets, small magazines, and offbeat bookstores, thus using poetry to bridge the divide between North America and Latin America (its name combined the jazz horn of North America with the Plumed Serpent of the Aztecs). _Corno’s_ heaviest representation was from Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. Poems of North American Beats like Allen Ginsberg were common, as were poems by the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal. _Corno_ proposed a process of cultural cross-pollination by which the Beat poets’ countercultural consciousness and Ernesto Guevara’s new socialist man might come together. Yet these twin influences—cultural rebellion from the north and political revolution from the south—offered as many points of divergence as convergence. Instead of fusing the cultural currents of north and south, this poets’ Panamericanism of the 1960s often acted as a proto-political force, leading both North American and Latin American writers (Randall and Cardenal among them) to turn away from the cultural rebellion represented by U.S. countercultures and embrace national political revolution on the model of Cuba.

The site of the second set of crossroads is Sandinista Nicaragua. The Sandinista leadership abounded with literary figures, the poetry and testimonios written by these leaders were key to the development of a revolutionary culture that unified opposition to the rule of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. After the Sandinista victory in 1979, what was called the “nation of poets,” became what might be called a “nation-state of poets.” Scores of writers went to Nicaragua, including Margaret Randall, who moved from Cuba to interview the major writers of Nicaragua, among others. In 1982, Ernesto Cardenal (then Minister of Culture) joined with two former _Corno_ contributors, Allen Ginsberg and Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, to draft a declaration that would invite “all the world’s writers” to travel to Nicaragua. By asking for support for a single nation, the declaration is quite different from the transnationalism of _Corno,_ which brought together its three authors twenty years before. Yet the declaration does not ask for a nationalist solidarity—writers supporting the revolutionary nation-state—as much as it asks that writers support Nicaragua because it is a country of writers, of poets. This turn to literary solidarity is not a retreat from politics as much as it is an attempt to relocate the political in writing, especially in dissident and nonconformist writing, at a time when fear of authoritarianism was high. If at the first crossroads, the movement was from rebellious poetry to national politics, then the movement suggested by the “Declaration of Three” is the opposite: from national politics to the politics of poetry.