​Whose Movement Is It?: Narratives & Strategies from the Domestic Workers Labor Movement

Sujatha Fernandes established a peer working group that includes domestic workers, organizers, and GC staff. While meeting weekly, they also organized panel discussions, public forums, an evening of poetry and performance, a political education workshop, and a film screening on issues pertaining to domestic and immigrant workers and workers’ rights. The group also collaborated with the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics to organize a conference entitled Consciousness and Revolution, which brought together international worker-activist and scholarly perspectives on movement building. This fall, GC doctoral student Courtney Frantz will coordinate regular meetings as well as a workshop exploring the complex relationships between the philanthropic sector and the low-wage workers’ movement.

In addition to fostering a genuine and deep collaboration between community partners and academics, and creating a space for social movements to enter and interact within the academy, the group has also been able to reach broader audiences by publishing collaborative texts in both popular and academic journals including Contexts, Dissent, Critical Sociology, and Social Text. Next year, Fernandes’ research will be published in the book Curated Stories: How Storytelling is Hindering Social Change (Forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2017).