Union Leadership Development as Driver of Equity and Inclusion

Analysis generated for the research project on Young Workers and the Labor Movement highlighted the need for innovative leadership development if young workers are to be integrated into an increasingly diverse workers’ movement, and unleashed to provide leadership in established institutions that face a radically changing economy and workforce. We examine one successful leadership development program: the New York State AFL-CIO/Cornell Union Leadership Institute. We look at the theoretical underpinnings, development, and outcomes of this multi-union, multi-sector program over the past 17 years, note its impact on the New York regional labor movement, and analyze the key factors accounting for the program’s successful development of innovative-minded young labor leaders. Those factors venturing beyond the traditional “skill-building “ approach of most labor leadership training toward a more transformational model of leadership development; an emphasis on experiential learning, using a variety of learning modes; providing a safe space and what Kurt Lewin describes as “a community of practice” where difficult challenges can be tackled collectively; and using leadership development as a tool to build inclusion and solidarity across many dimensions of difference, including age, race, gender, ethnicity, sector, able-ness, education level, industry, and more

Some Global Aspects of Duality is String Theory

We explore some of the global aspects of duality transformations in String Theory and Field Theory. We analyze in some detail the equivalence of dual models corresponding to different topologies at the level of the partition function and in terms of the operator correspondence for abelian duality. We analyze the behavior of the cosmological constant under these transformations. We also explore several examples of non-abelian duality where the classical background interpretation can be maintained for the original and the dual theories. In particular we construct a non-abelian dual of $SL(2,R)$ which turns out to be a three-dimensional black holeComment: 31pp. One figure available upon request. CERN-TH-6991/6

Primitive Vassiliev Invariants and Factorization in Chern-Simons Perturbation Theory

The general structure of the perturbative expansion of the vacuum expectation value of a Wilson line operator in Chern-Simons gauge field theory is analyzed. The expansion is organized according to the independent group structures that appear at each order. It is shown that the analysis is greatly simplified if the group factors are chosen in a certain way that we call canonical. This enables us to show that the logarithm of a polinomial knot invariant can be written in terms of primitive Vassiliev invariants only.Comment: 15 pages, latex, 2 figure