Class Con III

• 11:00 a.m. David Buehrer, Valdosta State University
  “Here everyone gets by, just barely”:  Race, Class, Place, and Menacing Violence in Russell Banks’ American Spirits"
  In his posthumously published American Spirits (2024), Russell Banks continues his neo-realist exploration “of the doomed and forgotten American male”, here through a “powerful triptych of novellas” set in Sam Dent, a fictional representation of Keene, NY, the village in the Adirondack High Peaks area where Banks lived and wrote for many years. That was also the setting for his 1991 novel The Sweet Hereafter, and in the kind of “self-intertextuality” for which he’s known, Banks reintroduces us in American Spirits to people and places that highlight “the conjuncture of America’s racial stain and the injuries of class society”  that often leads to tragedy and violence, especially if guns are added to “that mix”, as occurs in two of the collection’s stories. With traces of and perhaps as an homage to Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), plus intertextual references to Banks’s own canon of works, including Trailerpark (1981), an earlier book of linked stories with a first-person plural narrator, American Spirits explores the conflicting nexuses of class, race, and contemporary politics as they converge in Sam Dent, “a symbol of the country’s great striving middle”, “[the] hometown for eleven hundred disparate souls” where “everyone gets by, just barely”.
• 11:15 a.m. Jianing Su (online), Xi'an Jiaotong University, China
  “Class Narratives in Pop Lyrics: Emotional Engagement through Power-Related Expressions”
  This study analyses power-related terms in pop lyrics to understand their contribution to the emotional ambience. These expressions evoke intense emotions and act as a channel for connection. It is suggested that that class narratives in pop lyrics evoke emotional engagement. These narratives mirror and contribute to societal power structures. power-related expressions in pop music lyrics show its capacity to resonate with audiences on universal themes. This resonance makes pop music a tool for emotional engagement. Future research can explore the development of these narratives and their influence on sociocultural changes to understand the relationship between music, class, and listeners’ emotions.
• 11:30 a.m. William Scarborough (virtual), University of Akron
  “Labor that Uplifts: Dignity of Work in Modern Climate Fiction”
  This presentation examines the rise in dignity of work within science-fiction, particularly climate fiction. Traditionally, the sci-fi genre has explored post-labor societies in which machines have largely replaced man. However, with the advent of climate fiction and growing awareness of the climate crisis, the genre has shifted its focus toward more worker-centric futures. In examining works such as those of the author, Kim Stanley Robinson, this presentation applies the concept of "dignity of work" to climate fiction, highlighting the intersection of environmental stewardship and labor.

• 12:00 p.m. Becca Cragin, Bowling Green State University
  “How to Write About Class on TV”
  While most television scholarship on axes of inequality focuses on gender/sexuality or race/ethnicity, class is a central factor in their expression in popular culture, as in everyday life. This panel explores the intersection of class with other aspects of social identity, modeling cultural analysis that is attentive to both medium-specific form and social/ideological structures. In “How to Write About Class on TV,” Becca Cragin establishes a theoretical and pedagogical foundation for this approach.
• 12:15 p.m. Sarah Hopson, Bowling Green State University
  “That’s Some Classy Schitt: Exploring Notions of Class and Classy Behavior in Pop TV’s Schitt’s Creek”
  In Pop TV’s Schitt’s Creek, comedy emerges when the rich are pitted against the poor, but not for the reason you think. As the newly disenfranchised Rose family settles into their nightmare-turned-reality in the small town of Schitt’s Creek, they discover that their high fashion, ridiculous wigs and arrogant demeanor cannot protect them from being the laughing stocks of their new community. In time, however, their cultural capital which they clutch like pearls, can be used to leave their new home better than they found it. In Pop TV’s Schitt’s Creek, the Rose family illustrates how cultural capital can uplift communities and move them towards a power-sharing mentality while encouraging others to become more decent people. Leading by example, they demonstrate to viewers how cultural capital from both sides of the urban/rural divide can encourage equal participation in their communities all while, of course, keeping it classy.
• 12:30 p.m. Anastasia Hyden, Bowling Green State University
  “Veronica Mars is the 99%”
  Veronica Mars has the most realistic depiction of wealth inequality, and is the most consistent theme throughout the show, from the first scene in the original series, to the final voiceover in the revival 15 years later. I will discuss this as well as the theme of class solidarity within the franchise.
• 12:45 p.m. Joe Macdonald, Bowling Green State University
  “Daria, Jodie, Racial Identity and Class Struggle in the High School Setting in MTV’s Daria”
  Adult animation has a misunderstood and undervalued place in television’s history. No show more so than MTV’s Daria. Daria dealt regularly tackled hard topics, and often covered the problems of class struggle and hegemony through the lens of the upper middle class suburban high school setting. Characters such as Daria Morgendorffer and Jodie Landon are forced to deal with in ways that are complex, interesting, and unique to television history.

• 2:00 p.m. Josh Schwartz, Cornell University
  “Teaching the History of the American Middle Class”
  Arguably the most confounding thing about the American class system is that few people – scholars included – find themselves willing or able to talk about it in a serious way. The middle class is particularly slighted in this way; as the historian Robert Johnson put it, “Arguably no class in human history has received so much comment, but so little systematic study, as this collection of tens of millions of people.” This presentation is about an attempt to do exactly that kind of systemic study, in a seminar I taught twice called The History of the American Middle Class 1850-Present. It will discuss the challenges faced in trying to introduce students to the interdisciplinary study of class, and the opportunities that taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject can create in engaging student interest.
• 2:15 p.m. William Scarborough (virtual), University of Akron
  “A Course with Discourse: Political Disclosure in the Classroom”
  With trust in public and higher education diminishing, this presentation seeks to address the concerns of politics within the classroom, particularly in humanities courses. The current trend is to de-politicize the classroom, placing a veil around instructors and their beliefs. This presentation instead focuses around a framework of instructor disclosure, in-class dialogues, and self-regulation of bias, offering a path toward a more transparent and objective classroom. It also addresses the potential issues of this more transparent framework, including inter-class conflict, bigotry, and navigating fact-checking.
• 2:30 p.m. Mitch Hernandez, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
  "Managerialism, Debt, and the Class Composition of the University"
  This paper examines the class structure of the University, and queries whether the progressive/liberal positioning of the University on behalf of itself belies its material reality. This contradiction is appraised on the basis of how the rhetoric of the University so often is predicated upon identity, which serves to elide the way in which the University reproduces class hierarchy. Ultimately, it is my contention that by viewing the University with a sober lens we can be frank about the possibilities that exist within it vis-a-vis class politics.
• 2:45 p.m. Adam Rensch, Bowling Green State University
  “Academic Serfdom & the End of Higher Education”
  This paper examines the class structure of higher education in the United States. I argue that the post-war model of higher education—expanding access to working people—has been replaced by a university monopoly, one which has retained the language of opportunity and mobility but functions primarily as a means of reproducing economic inequality. Universities accept and rationalize this inequality, even as they champion the rights of the oppressed and pay lip service to “first generation” students.

Panelists:
Heather Andolina, president of the Melungeon Heritage Association
Muhammad Sheeraz Dasti, Bowling Green State University MFA Creative Writing Program
Matt Donahue & Charles Coletta, professors in the Bowling Green State University Popular Culture Program

This roundtable brings together four organizers for special topic conferences for an honest discussion about the practicalities of building a community, raising funds, and event management around specific interests.  

Heather Andolina is the president of the Melungeon Heritage Association, the host of the Melungeon Voices Podcast, and organizer for the Melungeon Heritage Association Conference, now in its third decade. Muhammad Sheeraz Dasti is in the BGSU MFA writing program and has experience organizing conferences in Pakistan, particularly around economic and cultural issues. 

Matt Donahue & Charles Coletta are professors in the BGSU Popular Culture Program and have organized several conferences together on topics ranging from comic book characters to funk music, and romance novels. 

• 5:30 p.m. Elizabeth Johnson (virtual), Tennessee State University and Donald Culverson, Governors State University
  “Class Representations in Popular Culture: Films that Deconstruct the Chaos of Homelessness”
  Assumptions are made about the socio-economic and mental health status of the homeless due in part to the “reading” of those with a sign seeking assistance. Films also offer readings of the homeless, categorizing individuals as mentally challenged, financially destitute, and/or con artists. Are these individuals homeless because of their economic plight? This paper deconstructs three motion picture films: The Pursuit of Happyness, The Public, and The Caveman’s Valentine, to see how viewers read the black male homeless population. These films bring out black homelessness and mental instability as public problems, not just dysfunctional people. The films help viewers challenge conventional ways of telling his/her stories, and give voice to those experiences silenced by tradition.
• 5:45 p.m. Maham Khan, Kent State
  “What’s the Point of Having a Grown Son at Home?”: Reading Class Anxieties in Sadiq’s Joyland”
  This presentation will explore how issues of class inequality can often be coded as queerness, specifically in representations of working-class masculinity in Saim Sadiq’s 2022 film Joyland. Anxieties surrounding class mobility in the context of the khwaja sira community in South Asia are often expressed as anti-secular and homophobic sentiments, reducing class struggles to what Ammara Maqsood identifies in her book The New Pakistani Middle Class as “ethical self-cultivation”. While Maqsood illustrates how the new middle-class relies upon this cultivated piety to distance itself from a lower socioeconomic class without relying on Western notions of modernity, I would extend the argument further to argue that anti-trans movements in Pakistan are rooted in anxieties about class, and not secularism and sexuality.
• 6:00 p.m. Vivienne Tailor (online), Claremont Graduate University
  “Hysterical Hysteria and Spatialized Paranoia: Korean Dis/Unity in The Wailing (2016), Parasite (2019), and Concrete Utopia (2023)”
  Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing  (곡성, 2016), Bong Joon-ho’s   Parasite (기생충, 2019), Tae-hwa Eom’s Concrete Utopia (2023) all tread twisting and disturbing cinematic narratives of peripheral outgroup individuals and collectives benignly, insidiously, and violently invading other social groups.  Each film director employs black comedy that reaches hysterical proportions both in terms of laughter and terror while visualizing the geography and architecture in ways that illustrate transgressions of identity and class boundaries. In all three films, demarcations among the empowered, the peripheral, and the subaltern become savagely breached, as these films expose cultural anxieties regarding the fears of the Other, as found in the external, the local, and the Self.

• 6:30 p.m. Charles A. Coletta, Bowling Green State University
  “Blondie & Dagwood: Comics’ Class-Conscious Couple”
  Blondie is the third-longest-running newspaper comic strip that is still ongoing. Despite its firm placement within middle-class sensibilities, Blondie began as comic strip focused on the class differences of the Great Depression era. When the comic strip debuted on September 8, 1930, Blondie Boopadoop was introduced as a ditzy gold-digger and Dagwood was the son of billionaire. The grim realities of the Great Depression made the screwball comedy about a spoiled playboy and flighty girl seem outdated. The Bumstead family strongly disapproved of Dagwood marrying a girl beneath his social class. The couple’s marriage led to their disinheritance and the focus of the comic strip became life in middle-class suburbia. This presentation shall explore the evolution of Blondie from its focus on class-bound concerns of the 1930s to its more familiar (and successful) representation of the mundane tasks of middle-class life.
• 6:45 p.m. Alan Jozwiak, University of Cincinnati
  “Romance Comics, Erotic Frustration, and Class Resistance: Towards a Typology of Class Roles Using the Serialized Adventures of the Romantically Thwarted Airline Stewardess Bonnie Taylor”
  This presentation will introduce a typology of class roles designed to explore comic characters and their relationship to class. After explaining this typology, the main focus of the presentation will be on the Class Adjacent role. This class roles describes a character who does not belong to a particular class but is adjacent to that class, thereby allowing them the potential to move into that class if desired and circumstances allow. An example of such a character in comics is Bonnie Taylor, the perennially romantically frustrated stewardess in Young Romance (1963–1965). Bonnie Taylor’s role as a Class Adjacent character will be explored considering how airline stewardess training at the time mimicked upper-class behavior and appearance to cater to the elite clientele. The presentation will explore how Class Adjacent characters can unintentionally challenge class structures, highlighting how class dynamics influence comic characters.
• 7:00 p.m. Garrett Scherff, Bowling Green State University
  “I Was Overworked at my Office Job So I’ll Present on Isekai in Another World”
  Between the excessively long, overly descriptive titles and the acceptance of overpowered heroes, the isekai genre, directly translated as “another world,” showcases a desire rising within the rank and file of middle- and working-class individuals.  As a form of escapism, the genre presents a solution to the brain drain: a return to the bucolic and simple life where a person can work at their own pace, support themselves, and find their people.

• 11:00 a.m. Cenk Tan (online) Pamukkale University, Turkey
  “Redefining Survival: Post-Apocalyptic Class Critiques in Snowpiercer, Silo, and Fallout”
  This paper examines the depiction of class systems in post-apocalyptic television series Snowpiercer (2020–2024), Silo (2023), and Fallout (2024), exploring how these series critique entrenched socio-economic hierarchies through their dystopian frameworks. Snowpiercer portrays an oppressive train-bound society where class is spatially and violently enforced (Sinha, 2022). Silo interrogates surveillance and control mechanisms in a subterranean dystopia, reflecting themes of class and rebellion (Taylor, 2023). Fallout critiques corporate greed through its Vault experiments, which convert survival itself into a commodity (Jenkins, 2024). These series ultimately blend speculative fiction and political critique, offering rich insights into the enduring legacies of class oppression.
• 11:15 a.m. Elena Apostolaki (online) University of Cologne, Germany
  “Class, Capitalism, and the Lumpenproletariat in Sons of Anarchy, Breaking Bad, and True Detective”
  This presentation examines the portrayal of class and the lumpenproletariat—a term coined by Karl Marx to describe the marginalized underclass excluded from traditional labor—in Sons of Anarchy, Breaking Bad, and the second season of True Detective. While often analyzed for their crime narratives, these shows offer incisive critiques of capitalist systems that perpetuate economic inequality. This paper argues that they depict not only class divisions but also how characters are driven into the lumpenproletariat as they are excluded from stable labor and economic mobility.
• 11:30 a.m. Rory Burmeister, Bowling Green State University
  “The Cannibal Episode: Misrepresenting Rural Americans in Supernatural Horror”
  In many supernatural horror television shows, there will almost inevitably be a cannibal episode, where the monster of the week isn’t a monster, but a poor, rural family that eats people. Using Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, this presentation argues that these television shows have helped perpetuate a new American myth; that rural people are inherently unlike “us” and need to be feared, or else we will be next on their dinner table. 

• 12:00 p.m. Lacee Harris (online), Drexel University
  "Illusions of Upward Mobility: Race, Class, and the Immigrant Dream in America."
  This paper explores the complex intersection of race and class in shaping the upward mobility aspirations of immigrants, particularly focusing on how contemporary immigrant groups face systemic barriers that diverge from the experiences of earlier European immigrant populations.
• 12:15 p.m. Sharon Zechowski (online), SUNY
  “Pitting Worker Against Worker: Class Bias in New York City’s Congestion Pricing Debate”
  Environmental issues are working-class issues, yet this narrative is rarely the focus of corporate media. New York’s congestion pricing debate reflects the problem with such environmental elitism in so far that it has been constructed to reinforce harmful stereotypes about working people and their supposed opposition to, or ignorance of, environmental concerns. This paper will conduct a critical discourse analysis of the congestion pricing debate to better understand the role class plays in shaping public attitudes about the environment.

• 3 p.m. Sarah Urbank, Bowling Green State University
  “Political Dissent in 1980s Doctor Who: ‘The Happiness Patrol’”
  This presentation explores how the 1988 Doctor Who story “The Happiness Patrol” uses allegory to criticize the Thatcher government. This serial’s futuristic planet is haunted by Margaret Thatcher’s image and influence, satirizing her as dictator Helen A. Ultimately, Helen A is defeated through solidarity between parties that represent gay rights activists and trade unions. I argue that this story comments on historical political dissent and Thatcherism's ideologies to empower the marginalized and satirize her government.
• 3:15 p.m. Kitty Geoghan, University of Michigan
  “The Extractive Abandonment in the 1985 Doctor Who serial ‘The Mark of the Rani’”
  This talk examines the theme of extractive abandonment in the 1985 Doctor Who serial "The Mark of the Rani." Set during the Industrial Revolution in England, this serial features the Luddite movement as the backdrop for a science fiction story of an alien invader harvesting neurochemicals from the local miners, depriving them of the ability to sleep. This story thus functions as an allegory for what Adler-Bolton and Vierkant (2022) call extractive abandonment, a process by which the surplus population is simultaneously excluded from the workforce due to disability and exploited by the healthcare industry to continue generating profit for capital. I will explore how this representation of extractive abandonment resonates both with its historical context and with our contemporary moment, demonstrating the intersecting nature of disability and class struggle.
• 3:30 p.m. Daniel Kerns, Bowling Green State University
  “The Pollutive Effects of AI-Driven Techno-Capitalism in Doctor Who’s ‘The Green Death’”
  This presentation will explore how the 1973 Doctor Who serial “The Green Death” presents the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence, capitalism, and pollution in a British science fiction setting fifty years before tech billionaires begin to dismantle the United States government. The fictional multinational corporation Global Chemicals, led by artificial intelligence the BOSS and his human lackey Stevens, prioritizes efficiency and profit above all else, ignoring damages to the environment and deaths caused by the toxic byproducts of its mining method. While misuse of technology stories are not uncommon to Doctor Who, I argue that in conjunction with its critiques of unethical business practices, “The Green Death” exists in direct opposition to AI-driven techno-capitalism like the methods implemented by today’s figures like Elon Musk to enrich themselves at the cost of everyday people. 

• 4:00 p.m. Ben Thomason, Bowling Green State University
  “Weaponizing Nonviolence: How US Agencies and Non-governmental Organizations Adopted Gene Sharp’s ‘Political Jujitsu”
  This presentation explores Gene Sharp’s biography to focus on how he convinced institutions and powerbrokers to adopt his theories and methods, and how such powers interpreted and implemented Sharps ideas. I argue that while US national security institutions were amenable to fostering some of Sharp’s distinct methods and theories, they were less interested in his grand vision of a world without war that relied on nonviolent civilian-based defense for national and international security arrangements. Using archival documents from Gene Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institution as well as biographical texts documenting Sharp’s life and influence, I will outline Sharp’s professional life, exploring how national security leaders and institutions engaged Sharp and his ideas. I will end by looking at how Sharp’s methods were instrumentalized in US foreign policy through specific case studies, and the results of such US interventions for those societies on the receiving end of them.
• 4:15 p.m. Linda Levitt (online), Stephen F. Austin State University
  "Constructing Class in the 2024 Presidential Campaign"
  Although rarely part of American public discourse, socioeconomic class helped shape the candidates’ public images during the 2024 presidential campaign. Whether a person’s public identity is constructed by an individual, by media, or by popular culture, class is one of the factors that frames how individuals are broadly understood. In a ubiquitous media landscape, audience members have less opportunity to critically consider the information presented to them. The lack of critical thinking resulted in slotting the candidates into stereotypes based on a cursory review of their attributes. Disinterred audiences will process only as much information as they deem necessary to arrive at a conclusion, even when that conclusion is incorrect. This presentation considers how audiences likely used ingrained stereotypes about class to determine their views of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Tim Walz and JD Vance.
• 4:30 p.m. Daniel Burnfin: Invited Speaker
  “Social Classes and Social Ontology: Reconsidering Some Classics of Political Economy”
  In this talk I address the conception of social classes that one finds in classical political economy and argue that it can provide a convenient ontology of modern society or a useful ‘social ontology’. That is, it can help us to understand the kinds of individuals which constitute a modern society, or ‘what there is’ in society, as well as some of the latter’s peculiar dynamics and problems. First, the paper considers important statements from the orthodox school of classical political economy (Smith, Ricardo, Mill) and its heterodox school (Malthus, Sismondi, Marx) in order to reconstruct the analytical framework which they all share. In two additional steps, the paper then continues to show how Marx takes the classical view a step farther by clarifying an issue that it never fully and explicitly elaborated as well as how the classical view might be updated for a more modern view of contemporary society in our own time. 

• 5:15 p.m. Nathan Moore, UCLA
  “The Instrumental Beyond the Human: Transhumanism, Emanation Theory, and Critical Posthumanities for the 21st Century”
  Being “Instrumental Beyond the Human” proposes a radical reconceptualization of transhumanism through the lenses of emanation theory, post-humanist critique, and avant-garde cultural studies. It builds upon the traditional foundations of classical liberalism and the history of science by juxtaposing it with emerging digital humanities. Informed by the works of historical and contemporary cultural theorists, this treatise explores how socioeconomic narratives shape technological prosperity and its implications for humankind’s enhancement toward the avant-garde. By drawing upon critical infrastructures, this essay will move beyond traditional techno-optimism to interrogate how power, labor, gender, and race all intersect with emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, prosthetics, and even virtual reality in enigmatic ways.
• 5:30 p.m. Kristine Ketel, Bowling Green State University
  “Class in the Digital Classroom: Rethinking Technology Access and Educational Equity”
  As schools increasingly depend on digital tools and platforms, technology access has emerged as a critical but often overlooked dimension of class inequality in academia.This talk explores how students' success with educational technology is shaped by their access to social, cultural, and economic resources. The research shows that today's "digital divide" goes well beyond basic access, involving device quality, digital literacy, and cultural factors that create real barriers for working-class and poor students in every field of study. Building on technology ethics and critical pedagogy frameworks, this work reveals how even neutral-appearing technology choices in course design can reinforce class barriers and create hidden obstacles for students.