Salute to The Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies

Meet the Murphy Institute Students

A short film introducing several of the programs and participants in the four-year-old Joseph S Murphy School for Worker Education and Labor Studies. 5 minutes

Overpass Light Brigade

'Overpass Light Brigade' is a short film that tells the story behind Wisconsin's Holders of the Lights using innovative time-lapse photography and interviews with founding members and other activists. The film showcases OLB's simple, beautiful approach to performance art and creating “the people’s bandwidth,” that beckons any who want to creatively join public discourse and voice concerns an elitist political system clamors to quiet. 7 minutes

Sky Blue Collar

A businessman and a carpet installer enjoy a wild and playful friendship, but when their class-conscious bosses pressure them to steer clear of each other, the Romeo and Juliet of the workaday world must decide what's more important: how we make a living, or who we're living for. 8 minutes

Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class

Based on a book by MIT Linguistics Professor, Pepi Leistyna, Class Dismissed brilliantly navigates the steady stream of misleading representations of America’s working class, from the dawn of TV’s Golden Age, to our current crop of reality shows, sitcoms, police dramas, fake courtroom shows and daytime talk shows. Featuring a mix of classic TV clips, key media analysts, cultural historians and noted professors, including: Stanley Aronowitz (CUNY), Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickeled and Dimed), Herman Gray (UC/Santa Cruz), Robin Kelley (Columbia University), Michael Zweig (SUNY/Stony Brook) 62 minutes

 Q & A for Murphy Institute