2018-2019 Labor Studies Scholarships and Prizes

Currently pursuing his doctoral degree, Brian’s dissertation focuses on the question, “Why do fast food workers willingly exert their labor despite the low pay and little prestige afforded to the job?” His research, drawn from participant observation that spans 750 hours, challenges the assumptions often made about the requirements of hard work and notions of employee replaceability. Brian’s research explores unexpected pathways for agency that present themselves in the fast food labor process, filling a less-explored gap in labor research that addresses the conditions and processes related to worker consent, rather than resistance, under low-wage circumstances.

As the proud daughter of two immigrant and farmworker parents, Maria has herself experienced the impact created by inadequate access to services. These experiences were the foundation for Maria’s academic pursuits, which she is now furthering through the Ph.D. program in the School of Environment and Forestry Sciences. Maria highlights community resilience within farmworker communities through her research, including community-academic partnerships with organizations such as Community to Community Development and Familias Unidas Por La Justicia. Her research on housing and the health impacts it has on agricultural communities will allow community leaders to receive training to minimize these impacts and other health risks.

Through his intersectional work and research on health disparities and vulnerable working populations, Trevor explores the critical yet understudied impact that employer-employee relationships have on health. Conducting groundbreaking and comparative analyses of U.S. workers, Trevor documents who is disproportionately represented and the health implications of these inequities. In addition to his research, he has also been a strong advocate for these issues in the research community, calling for wider definitions of occupational health that include health disparities. He has also lead a series of Policy Roundtables on Work and Health with community partners and will be leading a Center for the Study of Demography and Ecology working group on Employment and Population Health in the coming year.

As an undocumented person who experienced a move from Guatemala to the U.S. in her youth, Alejandra has seen the exploitation of undocumented workers reflected in U.S. labor systems. Starting from when she was an undergraduate, Alejandra worked with the Washington Dream Coalition to advocate for undocumented students and young professionals. Her experiences as an advocate and an undocumented professional herself lead her to develop Undocu Advocacy Trainings to make educational workplaces more accessible to undocumented students and professionals. Her trainings eventually expanded beyond the university setting, to high school educators in South King County, and have helped over 700 educators across the state of Washington foster spaces of empowerment for undocumented students in their schools.

Alika Bourgette, History

During Alika’s graduate studies at California Polytechnic State University, he was highly involved as a teaching assistant and as an AmeriCorps VIP Fellow, organizing events for underrepresented students that revolved around the intersectional issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender identity, and ability. As a graduate student in History, Alika plans to continue this work at the University of Washington, and has a particular interest in the history of the fish canning industry.

Shifting Everyday Geographies: How Day Work Arrangements Are Reshaping Paid Domestic Service in Urban Brazil

Caitlin's dissertation research explores the major changes in employment arrangements currently taking place within the sector of paid domestic work, in Brazil. She will be centering her research in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. In particular, her aim will be to uncover the shifts from live-in (employment in private homes) and full-time, live-out arrangements, of domestic employment. Domestic employment in Brazil has been dominated by women and associated with low pay, long and irregular hours, job insecurity and limited coverage under labor laws. To investigate, she will be conducting in-depth, qualitative interviews with domestic workers and employees including union and non-union members.

Higher education reform and the politics of welfare state retrenchment and privatization

Jonathan’s dissertation research focuses broadly on the politics of welfare state retrenchment and privatization, and specifically on reforms to higher education funding in England, Germany, and the United States, in which organized labor have often played large roles. His aim is to incorporate theoretical insights from comparative welfare state scholars and socio-legal scholars in an analysis of the types of strategies that members and groups of civil society employ within given institutional, legal, and political opportunity structures.

Au Pairs and Their Growing Mobilization

Grace’s research project will center the experiences of au pairs working as child care providers in the United States in an attempt to understand their potential for identity as a collective working class capable of mobilization and enacting meaningful change. The project will build on her previous work that investigates the ways in which the federal au pair program, as administered through the US State Department, obfuscates the laboring conditions of child care providers by legally constructing them as “cultural exchange agents” rather than temporary employees or migrant workers.

Precarious NGO work and Neoliberal Governance in China

Wang’s research project seeks to understand how the precarious resistance of NGO workers is simultaneously limited by and facilitated by the intersection between the authoritarian state, neoliberal market economy and transnational NGO industry in China. Investigating feminist and LGBT NGOs, her research bridges the gap between scholarship on NGO organization in civil society, labor studies focused on productive labor and labor resistance, and feminist studies of social reproduction and affect, to understand gendered labor as a form of precarious resistance.

Domestic Workers’ Labor Rights in Seattle

Domestic work has historically been undermined, hidden, and classified as too difficult to mobilize due to much of the work being concealed within private homes. Recently, however, domestic workers have gained increasing legal rights and visibility in a sustained organizing effort, both nationally and globally. Kim’s research seeks to track and analyze this growing effort for labor rights amongst Washington’s domestic workers, particularly the push for a Domestic Worker’s Bill of Rights in Seattle, in order to offer more protections to workers operating in precarious situations.