Natalie Barman
Ph.D. candidate in English
October 2020
Tell us about your job.
This summer I’ve been working as a field organizer for our student workers’ union, UAW2865. Basically, I talk with workers about what's important to them in terms of their workplace and try to get them more involved with the union so we can have a strong union that protects workers.
What are some of the actions you’re most proud of?
It wasn’t just me, to be clear. We have a team of amazing campus leaders, campus head stewards and department stewards. And we’ve made a lot of really awesome changes this summer. One thing we were able to do: We started organizing over the spring to get summer funding for every grad student during the pandemic. We ended up securing $5,000 for every grad student at UCI over the summer. This came through fellowships, or TAships and top-off fellowships.
I think this was a really important win that shows not only do we have power as workers to affect change, but that the university does have the resources to pay people over the summer.
Tell me about your PhD research.
I’m in the English PhD program, and my research is about late-19th and early-20th century Anglophone fiction. My research about the decline of England as an imperial and economic superpower in this time period.
Right now, I’m writing about these two stories by Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, both writers from British colonies, and I'm thinking about how some of the economic changes in more peripheral locations shapes these two texts. Bowen’s story seems to be a response to Katherine Mansfield, and people talk about that in terms of aesthetic or feminist theory, but I’m more interested in the economic situation behind the emergence of these two stories.
How does your PhD research influence your work with the union?
I decided to volunteer with the union because I’d been reading, for a long time, Marxist theory and other theories of capital. And once I became a student at UCI and heard we have a student workers union, I was like, Oh, I should get involved with that, I've been reading about it for years. I wanted to do some political work that would apply the things I’ve been reading to my activism.
One other thing I’ll say, for a long time, I felt like I was reading all this economic theory and thinking about it in terms of art. But I ended up feeling a bit alienated because I felt like I wasn’t doing anything to better the world in the way Marxist theory suggests you should. But in becoming an organizer, I felt like I was making material changes and helping the working class on a day-to-day basis.
Now the flip side of that question: How does your union work influence your research?
I think my work at the union grounds some of my research. Working for the union has reminded me that none of it matters if you're not making an impact on the world. That's something I try to keep in mind when I'm thinking about what happened in 1926, for example. There were real people involved in these things, and if we don't want to end up in another situation like the British Empire, it's important to be thinking about all these different people, what you're saying about them, whose voice you're raising. It’s really important to have diverse workers represented, and it's something I think about when I'm doing my research.
What advice would you give to our readers?
Whether you're working in academia or not, it's important to remember there’s a world that exists outside of it. Whether you're working in a tenure-track job or doing something academic-adjacent, it's important to stay in touch with the different issues going on outside of the university because they have real consequences.