December 20, 2024<\/p>\n
Welcome to Volume III of <\/span>Ampersand: An American Studies Journal<\/span><\/i>. Since <\/span>our founding in<\/span> the summer of 2021<\/span>, <\/span>Ampersand <\/span><\/i>has prioritized the work of early career and contingent scholars.<\/span> In past issues, we have published new perspectives on<\/span> objects<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>spaces<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>archives<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>legacies of colonialism<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>processes of canonization<\/span><\/a>\u2014a range of projects all thinking about value and power in and beyond the academy.<\/span><\/p>\n In this issue, \u201cDisruption as Resistance: Labor, Noise, and Refusal,\u201d we theorize a more personal concern of graduate workers and precariously employed scholars:<\/span> securing better labor practices in the university through unionization, activism, and noise-making. <\/span>Between <\/span>March and October of 2024, graduate workers at Boston University went on strike to protest unfair labor practices. It was through our noise and labor organizing that we were able to pursue a more equitable institution.<\/span> This volume is committed to the confrontation to power through noise-as-resistance both within and outside Boston University.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Publishing a volume in the wake of the strike meant many disruptions in the academic \u201cassembly line\u201d at our home university.<\/span> This issue reflects directly on that experience in essays by BU organizers and, moreover, assembles a range of past and present disruptions of business-as-usual to empower and equip us all in <\/span>our attempts to secure forms of living that are fair and inclusive.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One wonderful outcome of this volume is that many of the writers disrupted our expectations of the scholarly essay and experimented with form, media, and personal narrative. Even essays that we might classify as solely one form often use methods that are outside of the traditional.<\/span> In part, our shared personal experience enabled us to locate new practices of writing and thinking about our present and past.<\/span><\/p>\n We therefore open this issue with a personal essay by <\/span>Maggie Laurel Boyd<\/b><\/a>, a 2024 BU PhD graduate considering how the noisy act of striking is also an act of the responsible educator, a sign of our scholarly commitment to identifying and inhabiting possibilities and of learning as both fundamentally collective and corporeal.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The issue then turns to scholarly considerations of archives, spaces, texts of noise, and histories of labor organizing and political protest. <\/span>Anne Callahan <\/b><\/a>draws our attention to the noisy mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, during the U.S. Industrial Revolution, examining three accounts of disruptive noises\u00a0 \u2013 stone blasting, hissing and shouts, and ear ringing \u2013 that reveal the friction between the emerging work cultures and values of different groups, from Irish workers to mill agents to female operatives. Looking at these nineteenth-century laborers\u2019 diverse responses to noise-amid-labor moves us to <\/span>Meghan Townes<\/b><\/a>\u2019s essay, which juggles the <\/span>scholarly and <\/span>the <\/span>personal<\/span>, <\/span>\u00a0analy<\/span>zing<\/span> how one small-town Alabama high school band marched for JFK\u2019s inauguration, making themselves heard on a national stage in large part due to the noisy organizing of Townes\u2019s grandmother, Valeria Wyers. <\/span>Using Wyers\u2019s scrapbook<\/span>, Townes assembles an archive of photographs, newspaper articles, and correspondence to sketch the labor history of Carbon Hill, Alabama, and reclaim her grandmother\u2019s disruptive legacy. <\/span>C.G. Branch<\/b><\/a> <\/b>links the 1960s with present labor movements via a close comparison of Hollywood strikes and the \u201cstar power\u201d that marks SAG-AFTRA and WGA activities. Branch illuminates the complicated positionality of \u201cmegastars\u201d like Ronald Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor as workers to chart \u201cthe role of privileged visibility in labor.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We then turn to two experimental, creative<\/span> pieces that draw upon and wield digital tools of our moment. <\/span>Capucine Rulli\u00e8re<\/a><\/b>\u2019s essay offers us recorded soundscapes that index the protests\u2019 call for UCLA\u2019s divestment from the war in Gaza, showing us how \u201cnoisemaking and listening prompt[s] a rearrangement of entangled affects, bodies, knowledge and representations.\u201d Through visual and sonic recordings of sounds taken on UCLA campus and outside of it, Rulli\u00e8re convincingly lets us engage with sonic forms of agency in the context of the history of protest.<\/span> On the other hand, <\/span>Stephanie Kaylor<\/b><\/a> <\/b>amalgamates the personal essay, cultural criticism, and Tweet-style provocations to demonstrate sex workers\u2019 complex relationship with social media. Kaylor shows how communities of anonymous and named professional workers\u2019 accounts create sites of resistance and connection \u201cagainst state and algorithmic efforts toward our expulsion.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Finally, we present <\/span>Camden Hunt<\/b><\/a>\u2019s experimental and parodic manifesto, \u201cMAKE LOVE TO THE MACHINE.\u201d Drawing on Marx\u2019s call for workers to reappropriate industrial machines, Hunt sketches a method for such reappropriation, namely a pseudo-spiritual sexual relationship with bourgeoisie-owned mechanisms. Hunt\u2019s satire pushes us to consider what noisy labor<\/span> satires <\/span>might be possible in the twenty-first century.<\/span><\/p>\n When BU Graduate Students made their voices loud, we created employment conditions more affirming to our lives. We are <\/span>delighted that this collection <\/span>represents a diverse set of voices and scholarly methods pushing us forward to seek more broad forms of equity in our university and outside of it.<\/span> The <\/span>Ampersand <\/span><\/i>team thanks you for reading the work of these remarkable and <\/span>engaged <\/span>scholars.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Maggie Laurel Boyd, Personal Essay, “Noise-Making, Possibility-Making, World-Making: A Reflection on Striking.”<\/a><\/p>\n Anne Callahan, Essay, “Noise and Work in Nineteenth-Century Lowell, Massachusetts: Stone Blasting, Shouts and Hissing, and Ringing in My Ears.”<\/a><\/p>\n Meghan Townes, Essay, “The Band Goes to Washington: Re-telling a Family Story About Gender, Labor, and Kennedy\u2019s Inauguration.”<\/a><\/p>\n C.G. Branch, Essay, “‘Mink Lined Pickets’: Star Power and the Screen Actors Guild Strikes of 1960 and 2023.”<\/a><\/p>\n Capucine Rulli\u00e8re, Essay, “‘Baby Shark,’ Helicopters and Quiet Hours: Attuning to the Auditory Politics of the UCLA Student Protests.”<\/a><\/p>\n Stephanie Kaylor, Creative Essay, “Hooker Killjoys and Beautiful Girls Available Now: Sex Workers Speak Out on Social Media.”<\/a><\/p>\nVolume III, Issue 1 (Fall 2024)<\/h2>\n