Learning and doing literate activity and labor activism in a graduate worker union
Kovanen, Bruce
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122142
Description
Title
Learning and doing literate activity and labor activism in a graduate worker union
Author(s)
Kovanen, Bruce
Issue Date
2023-11-28
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Prior, Paul
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Prior, Paul
Committee Member(s)
Dyson, Anne Haas
Gallagher, John
Smalls, Krystal
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Writing Studies
Labor Unions
Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
Abstract
This dissertation examines how union members’ engagement with literate activity mediates collaborative projects of social transformation and how participation in such projects consequentially transforms their trajectories of semiotic becoming in union activism. Challenging narrow, segmented accounts of people’s lives, activities, and communities, this dissertation offers documented narratives of literate action and semiotic becoming that trace how members of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) Local 6300 come to learn and participate (often textually) in labor activism across an array of spaces, times, contexts, and chronotopes. Drawing on audio- and video-recorded interviews, this dissertation presents two focal cases that examine aspects of organization (such as committees and working groups), the people who lead and organize them, and the literate/semiotic activities they engage in. I argue that by attending to the knowledge-practices of labor unions, we can recognize them as extracurricular spaces of consequential learning and becoming for many graduate students and as prefigurative spaces to reconsider what universities can do and should become. In writing studies, this research contributes to theoretical and empirical scholarship that connects literate and semiotic practices to people’s trajectories of development and social identities and expands understanding of the literate, semiotic, and learning practices of labor unions.
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