Lessons From the Past? Exploring the Legacies of the Labor Movement Among West Virginia Teachers

Severin Mueller

Advisor: Roger N Lancaster, PhD, Cultural Studies Program

Committee Members: Alison Landsberg, Johanna Bockman, Lou Martin

Online Location, Zoom (https://gmu.zoom.us/j/5515439923)
April 13, 2026, 01:30 PM to 03:30 PM

Abstract:

Using interviews and archival materials, this dissertation examines and reinterprets the West Virginia teachers’ strikes (1990, especially 2018-19). Do these labor actions represent, as many have argued, the rise of a feminist gender politics that displaces or replaces the class mobilizations in the coalfields? To be sure, the recent strikes come in the wake of deindustrialization and schoolteachers are disproportionately women. But the strikers themselves expressly lay claim to decades-long traditions of working-class militancy observed in the outwardly masculine local coal mining industry.

This dissertation brings together, on the one hand, historical and historical-comparative research methods and, on the other, a distinctly ethnographic design that follows a historical-anthropological approach. The overarching questions motivating this inquiry related, broadly speaking, to matters of historical consciousness and the extent of the retention or renewal of regionally distinct cultures of labor amid radical political-economic changes.
 
Rather than turning away, at a historical moment of deep and lasting structural change, from the rich traditions and memories of this radical labor history, striking teachers have instead sought to creatively bridge a gap to long-suppressed parts of their region’s history to organize their present struggle. This formation of a “participatory historical culture,” in the words of historian David Thelen, points to both continuities in change and change in continuity.