Panel with Catherine Gudis, Ellen Reese, Andrea Vidaurre and Susan Zieger

This roundtable panel discusses the impacts of the Black Friday shopping holiday on Inland Empire communities by analyzing the supply chain logistics, air quality, labor exploitation, and related issues to reimagine better alternatives.

REGISTER: https://bit.ly/blackfriday_CIS

BIOS:

Catherine Gudis is Director of the Public History Program at UCR and teaches classes in public history and 20th century U.S. history, building on her twin interests in modern consumer culture and cultural and urban constructions of race, space, and place. She is the author of Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Cultural Landscape (Routledge, 2004), and has contributed to and edited Cultures of Commerce: Representations of Business Culture in the United States (coedited with Elspeth Brown and Marina Moskowitz, Palgrave/MacMillan, 2006). Research towards her next book, Curating the City: The Framing of Los Angeles, explores the ways in which public art, performance, and history can help frame and socially activate urban space and place in Southern California. Another, future book project, To Market, To Market: Global Cultures of Distribution, addresses the history and impact of product distribution on the cultural landscape.

Ellen Reese is Professor of Sociology and Chair of Labor Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Backlash Against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present and They Say Cutback, We Say Fightback! Welfare Rights Activism in an Era of Retrenchment. She is the co-editor of The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression and Women’s Poverty and The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy.

Andrea Vidaurre (she/her) grew up in the unceded territories of the Tongva, also known as the “Inland Empire” of Southern California and graduated with a BA in Global Studies from the University of California, Riverside. She has lived at the intersections of multiple issues which led her to engage in work that advances her communities’ quality of life. Over the past couple of years, she has worked towards environmental justice throughout the Inland Empire. She is a co-founder, member and policy analyst of the Peoples Collective for Environmental Justice, a community-based organization focused on fighting environmental racism and finding solutions through community work.

Susan Zieger is Professor of English at UCR and the author of two books about nineteenth-century literature, media, and consumerism, Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008); and The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism (Fordham University Press, 2018). Her current book project, Logistical Life, is a cultural and literary history of the rise of logistics and its relationship to modern consumption from 1750 to the present. It has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. With Nicole Starosielski and Matt Hockenberry, she has co-edited Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (Duke University Press, 2021).