Virginia Tech’s political science master’s program has an extensive track record of placing future scholars in highly competitive Ph.D. programs and government jobs. Ranger McKinney hopes to be a part of this track record after they graduate with their Master of Arts in December. 

McKinney is a second-year political science M.A. student who is working tirelessly to defend their thesis. Ranger has worked with faculty as a graduate teaching assistant in the department for the last year and a half, with duties ranging from grading papers to assisting professors in their lectures. 

“Ranger has used skills learned within the program in a paid internship with Virginia Organizing, dedicated to revising and updating their field organizer’s manual,” said Andy Scerri, associate professor of political science and chair of McKinney’s thesis committee.

McKinney has also worked as an editorial assistant for the scholarly journal New Political Science, which involves managing new submissions and fact checking. They have demonstrated an incredible work ethic in their studies and work outside of the department. In the fall, they were awarded the Alex Stubberfield Memorial Prize for outstanding research, coursework, and teaching assistance.

Learn more about McKinney’s experience in the program, as well as their upbringing, scholarly interests, and plans for the future, in the interview below.

Where are you from and why did you decide to pursue Virginia Tech’s political science master’s program?

I'm originally from Upstate New York, but I've been in Virginia around 13 years now, in Lynchburg. My big motivation was my grandfather. He was a medic during the Second World War, and he went through Europe and ended up being there at the liberation of a concentration camp. As part of his job, he was tasked with taking pictures of the aftermath of the camp. He donated a lot of these photos to the Holocaust Museum, but he kept some with him so he would never forget. When he got back and he would hear people talking about not liking their neighbor for the color of skin, their religion, whatever it was; he would hold those pictures out and say, ‘No! This is where that talk leads.’ I don't have something like that, and I'm glad that I don't have something like that. But I feel like it's my responsibility to carry on that kind of legacy – being able to say ‘No, that's where it leads.’ But I add, ‘Here's a better alternative. Here's something else we can do. Here's how we can live in a world where this never happens again.’ That's my big motivation.

 

How is your research aligned with this? 

My thesis is on social bonds within labor. My central idea is that there's this certain kind of social bond that I call the ‘comrade social bond,’ which form something called a comrade trust network that exists within some unions. There are several traits, but the main ones that are the most important I see are the total equality of the membership and a shared political hope of the future of a different world that normally takes on a very revolutionary form. For instance, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which is one of my case studies. Specifically, I use one of their industrial unions focused on hotel workers, restaurant workers, and the domestic workers as one of my cases for a union that had this comrade social bond. I studied the period of the First Red Scare. Similar to what we're experiencing now, we see the government claim that alien outsiders are threatening the nation. Back then, they had the excuse of World War I and the ongoing Russian Revolution to say, ‘Okay, well, either you're an agent of the Kaiser, or you're agent of the Bolsheviks, or both!’ Either way, the government deported lots of people and they made it practically, if not actually, illegal to be a part of groups that were left leaning. The IWW was a main target because it was growing in popularity; it was explicitly socialist and revolutionary. Conventional wisdom tells us that during political repression like that, you should lose a lot of members. It's not so! The industrial union that I'm studying gained about six times its membership. Compared to the AFL-associated union, I argue doesn't have this social bond, which lost a significant portion of its membership, in part, to the political repression and because of prohibition. The IWW was also affected by that.  

What is your specific question about comrade trust?

My question is whether it increases membership retention. The presence of this social bond increases membership retention through periods of political repression. Because in unions, one of the major problems is membership expect material benefits from union. Fair enough! But during periods of political question, periods like Prohibition, where the industry is losing jobs and the union is not in a great position for negotiations, this obviously makes it a struggle to provide benefits. Since my project’s period of study unions have lost a lot of membership. Bargaining rights were chipped away at, right-to-work states popped up. It was harder to get those material rewards unions rely on for consistent membership. But my contention, the reason that I want to do this project, is because I think that there's something else that can bond members, and that's this social bond. That way unions are not relying on always being able to get raises, because you're never going to have the guarantee that you can always get a pay raise for your members, however much you want to do that. You can’t always get more vacation days. You can’t always get better conditions. Sometimes the political situation is just against you, and there's nothing anyone could do to prevent that without a lot more political power than unions hold currently. For me, what I want to see this research do is to go into the hands of union organizers and move them to break this kind of taboo that unions have of not embracing a longer-term, more radical political vision. Powerful unions, unions that have a radical legacy, are so focused on the here and now that sometimes they forget that they should also talk about what the total victory of the union looks like. They'll talk vaguely about social justice, maybe even talk about a more democratic world, but they don’t talk about a vision of what that is. They have no plan they are telling the membership. Again, fair enough! There is a lot to talk about in the here and now. But they're not connecting what the members are doing today to any larger vision. It is that connection that I think is an essential part of that social bond. And that's what's absent today and what I believe can help unions through the difficult period we’re going through right now.

Can you touch on your experience in the political science M.A. program and how those skills have prepared you for the future?

I was a historian in my undergrad studies. I was doing my undergrad thesis, and someone told me that my project was very theoretical. That made me think that I should go to a political science program and learn theory so I could carry on with my line of thought. I definitely learned political theory in this program. Dr. Debrix made sure of that! You learn how to do a lot of work quickly and absorb a lot of information – way more than in undergrad. I've put out really good work that I'm proud of. I have grown as a writer and as an academic. The diversity of the department is really great, because everyone in this department's doing a different topic. You know, it would be a boring conversation if everyone did the same thing. The intense research that you get to do in the M.A. is preparing me to go into a Ph.D. program. The research project process prepares you for that because it's independent research, but you're not just thrown out with the wolves. There is guidance, but also the freedom to explore. This is a project that I have received help on from many sources in the department. I'm very grateful. I'm also grateful that this program allowed me to be interdisciplinary. I believe this is good for scholars in general to not be caught up in their own discipline.

What’s next for you?

Applying to Ph.D. programs and working on ethnographic research on social bonds in labor unions. I also feel called to put the knowledge I have to good use in organizing. Either way, I want to see more of the inside of labor unions – trying to see the social bonds in the real world that I have been writing about. In addition, I am further developing a lot of the theories I’ve been using as the basis of my understanding of this social bond, especially elements of gender and sexuality I haven’t had the time or space to explore in this current project. I would never have come up with these questions or had these ideas for how to answer them had I not had the theory and research methods I learned in this program.

 

Interview lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

Written by Patrick Salmons