Ryan Murphy will introduce his new book, DEREGULATING DESIRE: FLIGHT ATTENDANT ACTIVISM, FAMILY POLITICS, AND WORKPLACE JUSTICE, and discuss the creative activism of flight attendant unionists as they responded to neoliberal economic policies in their industry.

A graduate of Macalester College, Ryan is a former flight attendant and union activist at United Airlines.  He earned his PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, and is now an Assistant Professor of History at Earlham College.

Wednesday, October 5, at 7PM.  ​1105 Greenbrier Street, St Paul, 55106.  Free and open to all.

“Deregulating Desire is a stunning cultural analysis of political economy that explicates both the rise of neoliberal economic policies within the airline industry and flight attendants’ creative, activist response. Ryan Patrick Murphy shows us how the ‘family values economy’ came to operate and how flight attendants exploited the fissures within it. At this moment of divergent political responses to economic emergency, Murphy’s tale is as necessary as it is gripping.” —Nan Enstad, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century