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About Thomas Discenna
My primary research explores different aspects of academic labor including graduate unionization efforts, contingency, undergraduate labor in the form of unpaid internships as well as the labor of the professoriate. I was President of one of the oldest collective bargaining chapters of the AAUP. In addition, I maintain an active line of research in rhetorical theory and the study of the early twentieth century German philosopher Ernst Cassirer.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.
NBN Episodes hosted by Thomas:
May 11, 2024
Bootstrapped
The promise that you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is central to the story of the American Dream. It's the belief that if you work hard an…
April 1, 2024
What Work Is
Robert Bruno is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as Director of the …
February 28, 2024
Going for Broke
Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World's Richest Country (Haymarket, 2023), edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hards…
February 17, 2024
Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain
The remarkable story of a couple who came together during the civil rights movement and made fighting for equality and civil and workers' rights their…
January 30, 2024
The Struggle for the People’s King
In the post-civil rights era, wide-ranging groups have made civil rights claims that echo those made by Black civil rights activists of the 1960s, fro…
January 7, 2024
No Longer Newsworthy
Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of Ameri…
December 6, 2023
Undoing Work, Rethinking Community
This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique …
November 13, 2023
Hijacked
What is the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies…
October 15, 2023
The Bosses' Union
At the opening of the twentieth century, labor strife repeatedly racked the nation. Union organization and collective bargaining briefly looked like a…
September 4, 2023
Unionizing the Ivory Tower
Unionizing the Ivory Tower: Cornell Workers' Fifteen-Year Fight for Justice and a Living Wage (ILR Press, 2023) chronicles how a thousand low-paid cus…
August 18, 2023
Passionate Work
In Passionate Work: Endurance after the Good Life (Duke UP, 2022), Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being "passionate about your work" as an affecti…
July 17, 2023
After the Gig
When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work--giving earners flexibility, auton…
June 10, 2023
The Autocratic Academy
Critics of contemporary US higher education often point to the academy’s “corporatization” as one of its defining maladies. However, in The Autocratic…
May 7, 2023
King: A Life
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life (FSG, 2023) is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon …
April 29, 2023
The Art of Cycling
Interweaving a deeply personal narrative of elite-level cycling and mental health struggles with an evocative history of Western philosophy from Plato…
March 15, 2023
Campus Misinformation
If we listen to the politicians and pundits, college campuses have become fiercely ideological spaces where students unthinkingly endorse a liberal or…
February 8, 2023
Fascism Comes to America
From the time Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, Americans have been obsessed with and brooded over the meaning of fascism and how it might migrat…
January 6, 2023
Working 9 to 5
Today I talked to Ellen Cassedy about her new book Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie (Chicago Review Press, 2022…
December 4, 2022
Indentured Students
It didn't always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelor's degree. In Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generati…
October 14, 2022
What We Mean by the American Dream
The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up roughly where we deserve to be in our working lives based on our efforts and abilities; …
September 6, 2022
A Problem of Fit
According to A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students—and Universities (U Chicago Press, 2022) a college education doesn…
August 22, 2022
Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos
The 1929 encounter between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland is considered one of the most important intellectual debates of t…
July 21, 2022
Labor's End
Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work (U Illinois Press, 2021) traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the facto…
June 15, 2022
Rhetoric and Guns
Guns hold a complex place in American culture. Over 30,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, and guns are intimately connected to issues of…