The study highlights the everyday strategies farmworker families use to navigate healthcare exclusions while critically examining the limits of grassroots resilience in the face of systemic neglect.

Hazel’s work has been published in The Journal of Rural Health, Rural Sociology, and Women’s Studies Quarterly and The Conversation. She serves on the advisory council of Mighty Writers El Futuro Kennett and collaborates with immigrant-serving nonprofits.

Her research has been supported by the ASA DDRIG and the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety

Guillermo has a MA and BA in Sociology from UC Irvine. At UC Irvine he’s been part of campaigns and mentorship programs to support undocumented and marginalized students.

Michael is also an organizer with mutual aid and abolitionist organizations in Los Angeles. He received an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and BA from Vassar College.

Rosa Navarro (she/her) is a first-generation college student and the proud daughter and granddaughter of Mexican Immigrant farmworkers from the Pacific Northwest. She is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz with a designated emphasis in Latin American and Latinx Studies.

Rosa’s dissertation project is a transnational community-engaged research project in collaboration with Familias Unidas Por La Justicia (FUJ), an independent Indigenous Farmworker Union in Washington. Her project tracks the rise of the H-2A guest worker Program in the state and its long-term implications for local farmworker communities as the temporary guest worker program displaces and replaces local farmworkers from the agricultural labor market. She is also shadowing a transnational labor recruiter who recruits mostly rural Mexican men to work as temporary guest workers in the US to understand the role of labor recruiters in the fast expansion of the H-2A guest worker program.

Rosa was a community organizer for over a decade before returning to academia. She worked mostly in Immigrant rights work, deportation defense campaigns, and organized alongside domestic workers in Chicago for several years. She has an MA in Sociology from the University of Albany, SUNY, an MA in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz, and an MA in International Human Rights Law from the American University in Cairo. She holds a BA in History from Portland State University. Her public work has been published in Open Democracy.

Grounded in the Rio Grande Valley and Southeast Texas, Orlando Lara’s dissertation focuses on the growth of identity precarity and insecurity through the interrogation and denial of core state identity documents such as US birth certificates and US passports. While research on liminal non-citizen statuses has flourished in recent years, his ethnographic and archival research opens new ground in the study of the ongoing and intensifying challenges to legal citizenship and other forms of purportedly ‘legal’ status, including birthright citizenship itself.

Working with the artist Delilah Montoya, he co-created “Sed: A Trail of Thirst” and, with the Sin Huellas Artist Collective, the multimedia installation, “Detention Nation.”

His publicly engaged scholarship in the US includes research to protect DACA, advance immigrant rights and health post-Covid-19, driver’s licenses for the undocumented, among other topics. In Colombia, his research on the effects of statelessness was used in a ruling by the country’s highest court that protected plaintiff’s rights, and publicized the issue. He received ESS’s 2023 pre-tenure publicly engaged sociology award.

His research has been published in Sociological Forum; The Journal on Migration and Human Security; Territory, Politics, Governance; among others. He has an MSc from University College London and a BA from El Colegio de México.

Her research interests include medical sociology, inequalities, critical criminology, and visual methodology. She earned her B.A. in Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. While at UCLA, Katherine conducted research as a McNair research fellow on gang-affiliated mothers’ resistance through education. She received her master’s degree in Sociology where she examined the ways gang-affiliated women experience institutional violence and developed a conceptual model on life course criminalization. She continues this line of work in her dissertation by examining the experiences of Latina mothers with the carceral system, specifically the Child Welfare system and mental health.

Katherine’s research has been published in multiple journals and book chapters and her work has been included in policymaking toolkits at the United Nations.

His dissertation is a study of how deindustrialization and neoliberalism transform the traditional mechanisms of organizing race and class politics among working-class Mexican-Americans in Chicago’s former steel-producing neighborhoods. Drawing on extensive ethnography and archival materials, he shows how the changing political economy of the urban periphery, the decline of neighborhood civil society, and political competition between teachers and police shape working-class racial politics and collective action.

Prior to pursuing academic research, Rishi worked in community and labor organizing for more than 12 years. Rishi’s project is also supported by a Russell Sage Foundation Dissertation Research Grant and a Graduate Research Fellowship from the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.

Jennifer’s project emerges from deep commitments to research in service of social justice. Her work is grounded in direct service to deportees, deportable refugees, and deportee-serving organizations through pro bono legal and policy support to assist individuals and families fighting deportations.  

Jennifer’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (#1823363), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Fellowship Program, the Center for Khmer Studies, and the University of California, Irvine (Anthropology Department, Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, Center for Asian Studies, and Christian Werner Fellowship). She received her BA in Anthropology from Haverford College, and her MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.

Responding to the rapid growth of undocumented Korean and other Asian American populations in the US, Korean Resource Center (KRC) and the National Korean American Services and Education Consortium (NAKASEC) have become influential players in the Southern Californian and national immigrant justice movements, respectively. Yet Korean Americans’ complex positioning in U.S. racial imaginaries as both victims of white supremacy, and beneficiaries of anti-Blackness gives rise to discursive, ideological, and material contradictions in KRC and NAKASEC’s work.

The resurgence of more overt forms of white supremacy, urgent calls to center anti-Blackness in racial justice work, and social media’s role in mainstreaming and intensifying debates about effective anti-racist praxis combine to create urgent re-conceptualizations of what constitutes a “progressive” stance, and by who and for whom such stances should be elaborated. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Southern California, New York City, and Washington D.C., “Contentious Solidarities” follows KRC, NAKASEC, and the organizers with whom they ally and diverge to show how progressive Korean Americans navigate and respond to the contradictions that arise from shifting conceptualizations of racialized power and privilege.

A decade of organizing in national and local immigrant justice movements motivated Elizabeth to examine the internal racialized politics of immigrant justice worlds and the ways racialization informs how different organizers conceptualize justice for immigrants. A lifetime of navigating her identity as a mixed-race Korean American informs her exploration of the racialized contours of immigrant justice work.