Date: TBD

Time: TBD

CFP 54 - Critical Dialogue: CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Labor and Class I
Room: TBD

Sponsors: Labor Studies
Poverty, Class, and Inequality

Organizers: Leticia Morales, University of Southern California
Sara Maani, University of Bologna

Presider/Discussant: Leticia Morales, University of Southern California

Description: 

The session examines how labor and class intersect to shape lived experiences, social structures, and professional opportunities. Presenters highlight dynamics of working-class life, the impact of precarity and contingent labor, and the ways in which class stratification intersects with race, gender, and migration. The papers foreground how class is reproduced, contested, and transformed within institutions and everyday life.

Session I
Papers examine labor processes, workplace organization, precarity, and lived experience. They analyze how work is structured, intensified, and governed across sectors, and how insecurity, health risks, and vulnerability emerge within concrete settings.

Session II
Papers explore stratification, mobility, and social reproduction across education, care, migration, health, and policy regimes, showing how class positions are allocated, institutionalized, and reproduced over time.

Papers:

“‘A Different World’: Precarity Chains, Frayed Family Safety Nets, and Interweaving Substances as Factors Contributing to Opioid Use among the Working Class,” Victor Tan Chen, Katrina Hamilton and Erin C. Tucker, Virginia Commonwealth University

“Cut Labor: Perceptual Fragmentation in the Social Form of Service Work,” Yiming Bai, Brandeis University

“Disposable Products, Disposable Workers: Understanding How Dollar Stores Profit from Poverty,” Tracy L. Vargas, University of North Carolina at Pembroke

“Invisible Labor: Substance Use among Agricultural Workers,” Leticia Morales, University of Southern California

“Job Insecurity in the AI Age: Squaring Predictions with U.S. Workers’ Realities,” Jeffrey C. Dixon, College of the Holy Cross

“Merit as a Boundary-Making Regime: Cultural Constructions of Technological Excellence and Work Devotion in China’s High-Tech Industry,” Lingyan Tu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

“The Household Precarity Index: Measuring Objective and Subjective Elements of Insecurity during the Pandemic,” Emily Bonner, University of Oklahoma, Rin Ferraro, Sam Houston State University and Yung Chun, Washington University in St. Louis

“The Jagged Edges of a Broken Glass Ceiling: Powerful Women Are Discriminated against Most in Large Organizations,” Jennifer M. Krebsbach, University of California, Davis

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