Page - 11 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

11 Preface This project was decisively shaped by the experience of think- ing about the distance between Vienna and the York University Senate Chamber in Toronto. Austrian Airlines used to run a wonderful direct flight between the two cities, and the proxim- ity of York to Toronto’s Lester B. Pearson Airport meant that it was a relatively comfortable overnight experience after an early afternoon class. That distance was much further for the un- dergraduate students who, during the longest strike in Anglo- Canadian academic history — the 2018 CUPE 3903 strike, spent over two months in York’s Senate Chamber in support of the precarious teaching force that delivers at least half of their class- es.1 For many at York, Vienna exists rather nebulously and for the most part only discursively, in so far as they encounter it in class or on a screen. My attempt here is to elucidate and build on the connections I see between these two spaces, which are two of the most profoundly charged and potentially progressive po- 1 The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) is Canada’s largest union and represents nearly three-quarters of a million workers in such crucial areas as education, health care, social services, and transportation. CUPE 3903 represents nearly three thousand precarious education workers: teaching, graduate, and research assistants as well as contract faculty. That it is the largest union at York is indicative of the high percentage of teach- ing done by non-tenure-track faculty.