Leader News Hartwick Sets Spring Faculty Lecture Series Schedule

Hartwick College faculty will be discussing topics including labor-organizing campaigns, far-right radicalization domestically and abroad, and the mind’s interpretation of music during the spring edition of the 2022–23 Hartwick College Faculty Lecture Series.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Zachary McKenney will present “The Ruling Class Does Rule: Reflections on the UAW-Volkswagen Labor Organizing Campaign” in the first installment of the semester. The lecture will be held Friday, February 17 from 12:20 – 1:15 p.m. in Eaton Lounge, Bresee Hall, on the College campus. The lecture is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

“Fred Block was one of the first authors to break from the structural and instrumental debates that animated much of the discussion surrounding the state in the 1960s and 1970s,” McKenney said. “In his important essay, ‘The Ruling Class Does Not Rule’ (1977), Block argued, in contrast to the prevailing Marxist notions of the state, that the capitalist class does not govern or exert undue influence over the political process.” Through a case study of the UAW-Volkswagen labor organizing campaign that took place in Chattanooga, TN, McKenney will illustrate how Block’s theory of the state can no longer account for the growing number of examples where we see the ruling class actually ruling. McKenney argues that the situation that occurred in Tennessee is but a microcosm of a larger shift that is taking place across the political landscape in the United States.

On Friday, March 10, Assistant Professor of Music Ana Laura González will discuss, “The Sonic Identity and the Recording Journey: Is There One Way to Get It Right?”

“Think about our musical sound,” she asks. “Is it what is in our minds? Is it what comes out of our instruments, or is it what an audience (live or through recordings) perceive and interpret? And what if musical sound is all of it?” González will present on what it was like to record an album of chamber music for flute and percussion in collaboration with SUNY-Oneonta Percussion Professor Julie Licata. From a careful selection of repertoire, through conversations with composers and cover artists, to the final click of the release button on Spotify, each baby step becomes a statement of aesthetics, González says.

Assistant Professor of History Kyle Burke will close the series on Friday, April 14 with his presentation, “The Rise and Radicalization of the Transatlantic Far Right.” Burke’s lecture examines the origins and evolution of a varied yet coherent movement of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and skinhead groups in the United States, Britain, and Europe.

“Since the late 1970s, they have worked across national borders, trafficking in shared ideas, interests, and industries,” Burke says. “Advocating violence against their perceived enemies at home and abroad, they circulate texts, populate internet chatrooms and message boards, and plan international gatherings. As this movement has coalesced in the emerging post-Cold War order, far-right leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have enlisted young men as shock troops and guided them toward violence.” Moving beyond nation-centered histories of the far right, Burke’s lecture interprets this transatlantic white power movement as a product of militarization, globalization, and decolonization.

All Faculty Lectures are held from 12:20 – 1:15 p.m. in Eaton Lounge, Bresee Hall. Admission to the lectures is free and open to the public; campus visitors are encouraged to be vaccinated for COVID-19.

For more information, visit the Series webpage or contact Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Writing Bradley J. Fest, Ph.D., at 607-431-4921 or [email protected].