Last night I was on a #4c21 panel about Labor with others from the Local Arrangements Committee (LAC) and Social Justice at the Convention Committee from Milwaukee & Spokane. I was very honest about the labor issues that came up. Here's a with what I shared:

While we agreed with the decision for public health reasons, the cancellation of the 4C20 convention in Milwaukee was devastating for many of us “on the ground” with the MKE LAC. It was going to be Milwaukee’s year. We had CCCC and the DNC scheduled to come. #4c21

It was the 1st year that many of our current UWM graduate students had been accepted to present at Cs, and it had been an opportunity for many of them to gain some recognition for the amazing work they’re doing with an attunement to local communities and ethical engagement. #4c21

The LAC website became the primary focus of our local @writingmke editorial team. Starting over the summer of 2019, they spent countless hours (much more than the small number expected from volunteers on the LAC) designing, developing, and editing the 4C20 webpages. #4c21

In collaboration with other LAC volunteers, they put together an excellent set of resources for visiting Milwaukee and supporting local BIPOC companies and organizations: https://www.writingandrhetoricmke.com/4c20.html  #4c21

We haven’t taken down those pages yet because it just seemed too sad to have put so much effort into them for them to be rendered useless and not read by Cs attendees. #4c21

We wanted to have them available as an archive in case future LAC teams could use them or in case we could repurpose them for other local resources. I felt a particular sense of disappointment in what I had hoped could be a great year and conference for my grad students. #4c21

In addition to the LAC work, I was also on a team with grad students who won a Research Initiative grant and I was really looking forward to having them receive that at the awards ceremony in a place where their families might be able to attend. #4c21

The unpaid labor & lack of recognition made me regret asking my students to put so much time & energy into this project. Additionally, having their registration covered last year but not this year felt like an oversight in accounting for labor & precarity as we move forward #4c21

Questions I posed to the group were: How do we meaningfully support graduate student labor for LAC work in the future? How do we plan for doing right by those students even if future changes happen like the ones that occurred in 2020? #4c21

What do our commitments even mean to specific places and communities if we don’t account for the labor that went into an event to support this national organization? #4c21