Sergio Saravia (he/him) is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Sociology at Syracuse University. His dissertation, “Union-led Workers’ Political Education and Labor Movement Union Revitalization in the US,” examines why union-led workers’ education has faded from serious debates about labor union revitalization and how strategies to revitalize the labor movement have weakened workers’ political education programs. It seeks to contribute to debates on union revitalization by highlighting the often-overlooked role of labor and union-led workers’ education. It also considers how the production and dissemination of ideas help workers make sense of the labor movement’s present crises, given that unions are sites of critical adult education, knowledge production, and grassroots discussions about resistance and the reshaping of society from the ground up.

Sergio holds a bachelor’s degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and a master’s degree in Labor and Global Workers’ Rights from the Pennsylvania State University.

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

Summer also holds an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from Lehigh University. She organizes with UAW 4811.

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.

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.

Using a historical comparative analysis of government workers’ movements in Michigan and Ohio, two Midwestern states that once maintained divergent collective bargaining laws for public employees, Joseph’s research traces how insurgent unions in both cases drew upon a diverse set of resources and adapted their forms of mobilization to successfully organize across disparate institutional contexts.

Joseph has published research in Social Service Review, Social Science Research, and the Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, and he has taught at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. His dissertation research has received support from the Labor Research and Action Network and the Walter P. Reuther Library. Joseph received his B.A. at Portland State University and an M.A. from the Central European University.

Her dissertation examines how Black and Afro-descendent domestic workers have been central to the most progressive elements of the labor movement in the U.S. and how the gendered antiblack violence of slavery’s afterlife shapes their work experiences and fight for survival. Through semi-structured interviews, Black feminist grounded ethnography, media analysis, and oral histories of Black women domestic workers’ political organizing practices and work experiences in Boston, New York City, and D.C., this research investigates how Black and African descendent domestic workers and domestic workers organizations infuse radical care work into community building efforts to mobilize support at the grassroots and federal levels for the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and other struggles for workers’ protections and dignity. This research seeks to understand how Black women’s intersectional organizing around care work strengthens Black radicalism within the mainstream labor movement and re-envisions critical paths toward Black emancipation.

In connection with this research, she is currently an intern with the Massachusetts Coalition of Domestic Workers and a volunteer with Matahari Women Workers’ Center, and was a research analyst at Social Action for Health in East London.

Venus holds an M.A. in Medicine, Health, and Society from Vanderbilt University and a B.A. in political science, African American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from the  University of California, Irvine. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon World Studies Interdisciplinary Project, the Labor Action and Research Network, the Nichols Humanitarian Fund, the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst, the Graduate School at UMass Amherst, the Center for Global Work and Employment at Rutgers, and the Center for Employment Equity at UMass Amherst, to name a few. Her work has been published in Sociology Spectrum.

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 master’s research focused on how Jim Crow laws—and their formal dissolution in the 1960s—shaped labor solidarities. Witnessing workplace surveillance, racism within and outside of labor organizing, and legal restrictions on worker activism in her own workplace cemented her interest in studying legal constraints to worker organizing on and off the job.

Jennifer received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in 2015. As a graduate student, she has enjoyed teaching undergraduate students in the history department and through the Southern Oral History Program. Her pedagogical interests extend beyond the college level, and she has been lucky to also work with North Carolina educators and teachers on K-12 curriculum development for U.S. history.

Since 2006, through mixed methodologies led by ethnographic fieldwork and engagement at ports in Asia and the US, onboard, overseas, and online, Wu has been studying the lifeworlds and lifeways of seafarers – maritime workers delivering 90% of international trade who largely come from the Global South regions of Asia. His work delves into the techno-economic, infrastructural, legal, geographical, social, and environmental conditions and ramifications of container shipping in the postwar era, thereby unraveling the socio-technical, -political, and -natural relations generated by the global expedition of material goods and products, and systematic workings of commodity fetishism, racial capitalism, environmental extractivism, and neocolonial globalism of our times.

At Cornell, Wu is working on his publications including his book project about the sea and power – in its various senses from propulsion to organization, governance, and resilience. Wu specifically highlights Southeast Asian seafarers as the backbone of not only the international maritime workforce, but also the US and global economy and everyday lives in modern times. At the same time, Wu emphasizes that these overseas workers are navigating and bearing the brunt of climate change, geopolitical-economic currents, and industrial developments, including containerization in recent decades and the latest decarbonization endeavors of shipping known as “the 4th Propulsion Revolution”.

Overall, Wu’s industrial engagement and interdisciplinary research and teaching are bridging social oceanography, blue humanities, political economy, political ecology, and critical maritime, mobility, technology and labor, policy, globalization, and Anthropocene studies and advocacy. He seeks to understand the complex relationship between humanity and the oceans, and examine the intersection of translocal, transregional economy, society, and ecology of the sea beyond the maritime politics and dynamics of supply chain logistics. As an engaged scholar, Wu is actively involved in various organizations and working groups for the socially-just and sustainable development and future of oceanic communities and humanity.