Collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge. 
 -- Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination 

In the summer of 2006, the opening night of a conference, the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History, included one of the more memorable events of my life in academe: seventy-five scholars from the United States and Mexico, sitting at tables after dinner, singing "Solidarity Forever." Judging from the reactions around me, the event registered varying degrees of earnestness -- many of us have deep and substantive connections with labor movements, including, especially in the last decade, graduate teaching assistant organizing in U.S. universities -- and uneasiness -- from camp to irony to comments about the weirdness of well-off academics ventriloquizing themselves as workers. It was fun and funny, but also just awkward enough to be intriguing.