Announcing 2024-2025 Graduate Labor Research Grant Recipients

Anandi Bandyopadhyay, PhD candidate, History

Contested Mobilities: Making of Bombay's Transit System (1880-1947)

This dissertation aims to analyze the evolution of colonial Bombay’s transportation infrastructure as a dynamic process, shaped by various actors. The engagement of diverse stakeholders, including local elites, colonial experts, transport workers, and the general public, challenges a uniform technocratic expansion. Transport workers are one of the most significant groups of people the project focuses on. A vast body of literature has always been dedicated to urban workers in Bombay in colonial India. Bandyopadhyay aims to contribute to the existing literature by centering transport workers to discuss labor supporting urban life. Based on her preliminary research, Bandyopadhyay argues that the development of this workforce is more erratic than that of larger industries in the city. They emerged in response to the introduction and domestication of new technologies, a process that in itself was erratic due to the rapid technological changes in motorized transport during this period. They work as laborers in factories and transport company employees, but also in temporary and scattered businesses dedicated to repair and maintenance. Bandyopadhyay argues that this group of workers demands more sustained historical study since they span the formal and informal sectors of industrial labor and complicate established notions of technological expertise and innovation in the colonial context. 

Brett Halperin, PhD student, Human Centered Design & Engineering

Mujeres Atrevidas: Design Documentary as Participatory Inquiry Into App-Based Gig Work

This project proposes a participatory inquiry into the production of Mujeres Atrevidas, a design documentary about how Latine female immigrant gig workers navigate digitally-mediated structural inequities to mobilize their organizing efforts. In partnership with the Workers Justice Project, the project aims to develop and examine the film production of how digital app-based gig work promises techno-utopian democracy, yet exacerbates structural inequities across race, gender, and citizenship axes. The proposed scholarship promises to expand critical making methodologies with empirical inquiry and participatory film production, concretizing film-based theorizing with experiments in design. In doing so, the project endeavors to uncover how digital gig work apps may be designed for labor justice, as well as to reshape public imagination through screenings that spotlight socio-legal practicalities to guide compassionate immigration and labor policy.

Ellie Cleasby, PhD candidate, Geography

Who pays?: Working to reduce clothing consumption and manage textile waste

Textile waste is one arena where inequalities between the Global North and Global South play out. Hyper-accelerated production models under fast fashion produce a host of economic, social and environmental problems, largely linked to the ways in which cheap clothing can be considered disposable by those in the Global North. The attraction of “cheap labor” in Kantamanto market, Ghana, has made it a site where clothing waste from the Global North is absorbed, despite garnering little economic benefit for the workers and significantly contributing to environmental issues. Hackney et al (2022) offer participatory fashion practices as an important tool for both generating a sensibility for sustainability and for potentially combating the harms associated with political economies of fast fashion. These are the ways that people care for, adapt, mend – or even make – their own clothes outside of the formal structure of the fashion industry, contributing to reduced consumption and in many cases removing items from the waste stream. These participatory fashion practices might be undertaken by individuals as a hobby or by workers within a capitalist economic system.

Recipient of the 2024-2025 Charles Bergquist Labor Research Grant

Kyle Trembley, PhD candidate, Anthropology

Rattus Hierarchicus: Rats, Caste, and Labor at the Karni Mata Mandir in Deshnoke, Rajasthan.

This dissertation explores how multispecies relationships shape and are shaped by caste, religion, labor, and infrastructure at the Karni Mata Mandir, a popular pilgrimage and tourist site in Deshnoke, Rajasthan that is renowned as India’s “rat temple.” To the dominant-caste Charan community who manages the temple, however, these twenty-five thousand beings are not rats—they are kaba, reincarnated Charans from the lineage of Karni Mata and they are cared for as kin. Kyle’s research attends to how interspecies kinship and care practices at the Karni Mata Mandir are entangled with forms of violence in ways that belie celebrations of the temple as a site emblematic of Hindu eco-consciousness. Specifically, it examines how methods of differentiating kaba from rats intersect with practices of caste at the temple. His dissertation deploys historical and ethnographic methods to trace transformations in the political ecologies of the Karni Mata Temple in a moment when human relationships to the nonhuman world are being challenged and rethought. With funding from the Harry Bridges Center, Kyle will conduct further ethnographic fieldwork in Deshnoke with Charan and “untouchable” Valmiki workers employed by the temple to examine how certain forms of labor become stigmatized and how labor shapes orientations to life, the nonhuman world, religion, and politics. 

Miriam G. Flores Moreno, PhD student, Epidemiology

Beyond the Crops: The Health Impacts of Precarious Farm Work

Farmworkers are crucial to feeding the world, yet they experience labor-intensive jobs, long working hours, and job-related hazards with low wages and little to no employment benefits, placing them at risk of experiencing greater health disparities compared to other industries. These conditions may also expose farm workers to precarious employment, a term used to describe experiencing employment insecurity, income inadequacy, and lack of rights and protections in the workplace. Currently, there is no standard definition for precarious work. While a few indices and scales have been developed to measure precarious employment in epidemiologic studies among waged and salaried workers, none are explicitly tailored to the farm working population. Flores Moreno will qualitatively explore the characterization of employment precarity and factors that foster healthy work environments among farm workers through focus groups and key informant interviews with farmworker stakeholders. The findings will inform a quantitative analysis to explore farm work precarity and health outcomes. She will use the National Agricultural Worker's Survey (NAWS) to examine the association between farm work precarity and three chronic diseases: diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. The results from this study will inform a proposal to build an adapted farm work precariousness scale to assess employment precarity and advocate for farmworkers' rights, health, and well-being.

Natalie Vaughan-Wynn, PhD candidate, Geography

'We are still here!’...educating policymakers: the labor of stewarding food sovereignty in Indian Country.

The degrees of sovereignty realized by Tribal Nations through the always already entangled nation-to-nation relationship with the U.S. federal government are under constant negotiation (Dennison 2017). Natalie's work investigates how the labor associated with this ongoing negotiation is divided. A feminist analysis of work–defined capaciously– allows Natalie to explore the extent of educative and emotional labor, both paid and unpaid, undertaken by Native communities to bring government employees, policymakers, and researchers up to speed on the political, historical, and cultural context surrounding the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). To do this, Natalie draws on visits with and archives created by Tribal community members in the Pacific Northwest. Delineating the labor involved in this stewardship is integral to my overall examination of how Indigenous food sovereignty is realized through and outside of entanglements with federal policy.