Currently at Fashion Institute of Technology, faculty from School of Art and Design, School of Business and Technology, and School of Liberal Arts and Sciences are collaborating to find ways in which to engage their own courses and disciplines with business and labor history of working-class people. This conversation also invited professors at other universities. All together, they talk about how to utilize primary sources of their chosen discipline to address the history of working-class people or how to deal with lack of sources.

Business history as a subfield within history has developed its methodologies. A major aspect of the field is its combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. It is known that the research problems chosen and the approach to solving them have their origins in both economics and other social science theories. In this regard, panelists want to invite scholars of business history to think about inventive ways to study about choices and contributions of working-class people in the age of technology and innovation.

We hope that this roundtable enables scholars and instructors of humanities (including history, literature, philosophy, and others) to gain an empowered, informed perspective on the working-class people’s labor market, and enable them to make better, proactive career choices. Through the labor studies of economic equality, immigration policies, social activism, and global trade, students and faculty will understand themselves as part of a greater historical context in which economic, business, labor history is intertwined with art history, history of technology, and social history. Long-term, faculty will retain this knowledge and new educational resources to incorporate labor perspectives into all standard courses of art and design at a community college like Fashion Institute of Technology.

This roundtable would be an opportunity to discuss perspectives and theories relevant to the study of working-class people—especially artists and designers as well as students aspiring to grab jobs in creative industry. It will provide a casual conversation on efficacy of recent social and cultural theories formulated by economic sociologists such as Mark Granovetter (Embeddedness) and Richard Whitley (Reconfiguring Knowledge Transfer) and notable case studies by Philip Scranton (Figured Tapestry) and Naomi Lamoreux (Insider Lending). In this roundtable session, business and labor historians are invited to expose their toolkits, well-known or secretive, to lead a discussion for pedagogical innovations. One could share frustration over inefficacy or redundancy of digital databases while some may exalt the audience with potential impact of AI-assisted visual analysis of old magazine photographs. In a loosely formatted, roundtable session, presenters and audiences can dismantle the disciplinary boundaries and pose thought-provoking questions of what to use to better disseminate learnings of business and labor history.