Diego Martinez-Lugo, Department of Geography

Magonismo and the Chicano Radical Tradition

This dissertation project aims to carve out the foundations of a Chicano Radical Tradition by analyzing the anarchist movement known as the “Magonistas” leading up to and during the Mexican revolution. To uncover this tradition, Martinez-Lugo is analyzing the Magonista movement not solely in historical terms, but also geographically, visiting archives along the same route the Magonistas traveled to illustrate transborder dimensions of their organizing and political legacy. Martinez-Lugo aims to understand their contributions, detail their intellectual genealogy, and analyze their overall political development and they will utilize an international lens that foregrounds antiracism to better study labor militancy across nation-states and borders. This project seeks to advance Labor Studies by utilizing an interdisciplinary approach which will bring together the disciplines of Geography, History, and Ethnic Studies to integrate historical archival methods with geographic analysis of migration and resistance patterns.

Carlos Alberto Yanez Navarro, Department of Law, Societies, and Justice

Illegalized Bodies:The Architectures of Debilitation, Capture, and the Emergence of Migrant Justice

This dissertation argues that U.S. migration governance does not merely regulate human mobility; it actively produces illegalized subjects through the same mechanisms that disability scholars have theorized as debilitation: the systematic wearing down of populations to render them perpetually available for injury. Across three interconnected articles, this project documents, theorizes, and empirically demonstrates how the architecture of illegalization, from 19th-century statutory design to the contemporary detention-industrial complex, functions as a core productive feature of U.S. governance. The result is a three-article dissertation that offers the field of Labor Studies a new analytical vocabulary for understanding how the state engineers exploitable workforces through law, criminalization, and enforced precarity. Together, these articles use disability theory to investigate operations at three distinct analytical registers: structural, experiential, and organizational, and together they constitute an integrated account of illegalization as a governing regime.

Anna Nguyen, Department of Political Science

Who Cares for the Caregivers? Domestic Workers and the Fight for Minimum Wage

The 1974 amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act was an effort to force the state to recognize domestic work as legitimate and compensable labor, and also redefine cultural narratives about the household workforce more broadly. Nguyen argues that the successful amendment was a victory in which the institutional capacity of the welfare state expanded because of domestic workers. On the other hand, Nguyen also contends that the victory was limited and set a particular category of domestic workers—home health care workers—down an even more precarious path since they were excluded from protection under the law. Despite its good intentions, the reform effort ultimately led to the recasting of home health care as unskilled and the legal characterization of home health care workers as “companions” and “caretakers” rather than “workers,” which undermined the achievement of workplace protections for home health care for the next several decades.

Runjie Wang, Department of Cinema and Media Studies

The Iron(ic) Automated Fish Processing Machine

This project accounts for the racialized history of automation in the Pacific Northwest’s fishing industry in the early 1900s by primarily focusing on the automated fish processing machine “Iron Chink.” The machine was not only devised to replace highly skilled Chinese butchers but was also ironically and offensively named after them. Wang's archival research unpacks how the technological design, operational mechanisms, and industrial applications within the salmon cannery industry both corresponded to Chinese workers’ labor practices and embodied a racialized logic behind the machine's operations.

Caylee Song, Department of History

Korean Laborers During the U.S. Military Occupation (1945-1948)

This project will examine how the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), 1945–1948, used military-led public health programs to classify, discipline, and regulate rural farming laborers, recasting peasant communities from colonial subjects into Cold War, pro‑U.S. workers. Focusing on mass vaccination drives, sanitation inspections, hygiene propaganda, and mobilized village collectives, Song's project argues that ostensibly humanitarian health interventions functioned as a systematic apparatus of labor control that operated through gendered and racialized logics, including domestic hygiene roles for women, fitness assessments for male farmers, and asymmetrical STD policing in camptowns. With this grant Song will conduct multi‑sited archival work at the National Archives of Korea (Seoul and Busan) and examine local township records. Song will examine peasant experiences and trace how militarized public health practices shaped labor classification, access to economic resources, and the development and delegitimization of agrarian labor movements in Korea.

Gioia Skeltis-Robinson, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences

From Reef to Table: Assessing Strontium-90 in Marshallese Seafood and Implications for Fisher Livelihoods

This project aims to develop a community-level dietary and occupational health risk assessment for leukemia associated with strontium-90 (Sr-90) exposure in reef fish and giant clam from Kwajalein Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). Cancer risk assessments in the RMI have largely relied on nuclear fallout distribution data, with limited consideration of alternative exposure pathways such as dietary intake. For Marshallese fishers, seafood harvesting is both subsistence work and income-generating labor, making environmental contamination a condition of work. This study frames environmental contamination as a labor issue, generating data to support worker health, sustain local food systems, and strengthen community capacity in addressing the long-term impacts of nuclear testing.