Worker Writers - (CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric) by Jessica Pauszek (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Worker Writers brings together conversations in community literacy, archival methods, and working-class studies to explore the process of collaboratively creating an archive focused on the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, a transnational writing network between 1976 and 2007. Detailing a decade-long collaboration, Pauszek explores the FWWCP Archival Project, which has enabled the creation of a publicly accessible print and digital archive of thousands of working-class community publications and administrative documents. Additionally, this book:

• Offers a framework for community partnership and archival work that explicitly accounts for working-class identities and class-based structures such as labor, finances, and precarious material resources.
• Provides insights on the embodied archival processes, useful for teams doing documentation work.
• Illustrates the possibilities of community-based archival work.
• Argues for the importance of preserving working-class writing and literacy.

CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series

Review Quotes

"Worker Writers is a vital intervention into academic and public debates about the working class and their politics. Pauszek documents not only how working-class writers and publishers created an inclusive international working-class identity, but the literacies and critical pedagogies which produced it. For anyone interested in how to respond to the current attacks on the working class, Worker Writers is must reading."

--Ira Shor, author, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life

"When workers tell their own stories, they build an archive that helps us understand and remember how class works. As Jessica Pauszek shows in Worker Writers, the process of building that archive has its own power. Her narrative of the Writers' Fed (FWWCP), a worker-run network that led workshops and published working-class writing in late twentieth-century Britain, teaches us that the power of working-class organizing is as important in education and artistic efforts as it is in the workplace."

--Sherry Lee Linkon, Georgetown University

About the Author

Jessica Pauszek is an assistant professor of English and director of first-year writing at Boston College. Her work brings together community literacy, working-class studies, archival methods, and digital humanities. Growing up in a pre-dominantly Polish, working-class community in western New York shaped her interest in writing about labor, deindustrialization, immigration, and how we preserve these histories. Alongside com-munity members in England, she has co-curated a print archive of thousands of working-class publications and administrative documents from the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers at London Metropolitan University's Trades Union Congress Library. She has led the development of the digital collection at fwwcpdigitalcollection.org. Pauszek was awarded a CCCC Emergent Researcher Grant for this work and Honorable Mention for the 2018 CCCC James Berlin Outstanding Dissertation Award. She is coeditor of The Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition and the Working and Writing for Change Series of Parlor Press. Her work has appeared in Across the Disciplines, College Composition and Communication, Community Literacy Journal, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric.