Wal-Mart Symposium Thursday at St. Olaf College

St. Olaf College will host the symposium “Wal-Mart America: Changing the Face of our World” Thursday, May 4, at 6:30 p.m. in the Lion’s Pause of Buntrock Commons. The event, sponsored by Assistant Professor of History Eric Fure-Slocum’s History 297 class, is open to students, faculty, staff and the public.

The symposium will feature a panel discussion on Wal-Mart and American society, which will include speakers Jenny Shegos from the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789, Ross Currier of the Northfield Downtown Development Corporation, and a Wal-Mart representative. Panelists will discuss both sides of the controversy surrounding Wal-Mart’s role in American culture and politics, particularly regarding labor issues. The panel, moderated by St. Olaf students Anna Gieselman ’06 and Max Wojtanowicz ’06, will run from 7 to 8:15 p.m. and will be followed by a question and answer session.

In addition to providing a public forum for debate, the symposium also is designed to give students in Fure-Slocum’s class the opportunity to display their research projects and presentations, which examine the challenges of “big box” retail and a range of other recent changes in American society.

“This is an opportunity for students to engage in conversation on this topic with the public,” Fure-Slocum says. “Some projects deal specifically with Wal-Mart, although others look at broader changes in American society, culture and consumption, especially within the last four or five decades.”

Fure-Slocum adds that the symposium also is an opportunity for the public to discuss issues surrounding Wal-Mart that are currently “attracting a lot of attention.”

Fure-Slocum’s course, which lends its name to the symposium, explores changes in work, business, shopping and the everyday landscape in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Using Wal-Mart as a starting point, the class examines how the United States has developed from an industrial to a post-industrial society. Students look at 19th-century steel manufacturers and mid-20th-century automobile makers, learning to ask questions about how these industries have shaped the American landscape and what effects they’ve had on workers’ everyday lives.

“Although this is a history course, we look very closely at the contemporary scene, and that shapes how we pose our questions,” Fure-Slocum says. He notes that throughout the semester students have become increasingly involved in monitoring current events and proactively gathering information on the subject of “big box” retail.

“I usually send the students articles that appear in recent newspapers and magazines,” Fure-Slocum says, “but now the students are sending me articles that they’ve read.”

Michelle Pease ’08, who will present her work-in-progress at the symposium, is analyzing recent changes in “big box” retail, using her own experiences as a Target Corporation employee to research her project. “It interests me as a retail worker myself to see how retailers were doing my job 15 to 20 years ago,” she says.

Conducting interviews with several co-workers who have worked at Target for more than 20 years, Pease has compiled records on the training, salaries, job availability, advancement opportunities and technology that have influenced retail workers in her lifetime. She says her interviews have added relevance to the material she reads and discusses in Fure-Slocum’s course.

“Retail is a part of everyone’s life,” says Pease. “Everyone has been to a Wal-Mart or Target. It’s a part of our culture that we experience every day.”

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Tom Vogel is a Communications Specialist at St. Olaf College.