Evan Neely lives three mostly separate lives. He is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, where he teaches classes in political theory and art history. His work focuses on the relations between expressive interaction, communications technology, and the organization of labor in the 19th and 20th century United States. He also has a career as an illustrator, under a pseudonym, and Occupies Wall Street in the intervening hours.
A friend of Occupy recently passed away: Michael Nash, head of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU. I had only a passing personal acquaintance with Michael, but this is not untypical of the ways we … Continue reading “The Generosity of the Archivist”
One of the members of my working group, The People’s Think Tank, recommended me as a good person to speak to young activists last week at the Civil Rights Student Summit in New York organized by Teaching Matters. The folder they gave to the set of people they brought in to speak to the students, most of whom were in eighth grade, said “community activist” on the front. Reading that brought me back to a discussion facilitated by the Think Tank on May Day, where we got to talking about what it meant for us to be activists. When it was my turn to speak, the only words on offer were something like “I really don’t like to think of myself as an activist. I kind of want to think of myself as a normal person.
