ABSTRACT
In October 2016, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculty conducted a three-day strike that culminated in a successful contract settlement. The rhetorical and literacy practices of solidarity-building through nearly two years of preparation/organizing as well as during the strike itself worked at the nexus of two theoretical concepts: Artz’s (2010) speaking power; and Reich and Bierman’s (2018) networks of solidarity. This essay examines several key moments in the preparation for and conduct of the strike, explicating them for the lessons they teach about emphasizing genuinely human relationships of trust within systems and networks of power, descriptions of which all too often elide humanness. Those lessons are primarily of two sorts. First, the human relationships at the heart of our organizing hinged on trust in a very Freirean-praxis sense of the word. Second, and much more concretely, building successful networks called on us to understand who was not part of them, i.e., to understand very clearly that well-built networks organize and transmit power, while less carefully built networks often dissipate power by misdirecting it.
