Since childhood, I have been deeply committed to social justice, a passion that has driven both my activism and academic career. As a sociologist, I have sought to understand the structural forces shaping our world and how to change them strategically. Now, I seek to transition from an academic career to direct social justice advocacy, bringing my experience in research, organizing, and policy analysis to this work.
In many of the activist groups that I was involved with when I was younger, we lacked strategic insight and direction. This motivated much of my sociological research, writing, and teaching, where my goal is to equip those of us working for progressive social change to be more effective. My book Strategizing Against Sweatshops: The Global Economy, Student Activism, and Worker Empowerment unpacks how student activists were able to use their position on US college campuses to exercise leverage over major apparel firms and help workers in sweatshop factories around the world unionize and improve their working conditions.
I am active in a number of social justice groups, where I put my scholarly and educational expertise into practice:
• Faculty Forward: I am Co-Chair of the non-tenure track faculty union at Loyola University Chicago, affiliated with SEIU Local 73. As a result of our labor organizing, we have won better job security and better pay for all our members, and pathways that can potentially lead to full-time positions for our part-time members. We are currently negotiating our third collective bargaining agreement with the goals laid out in our vision statement of increasing job security for our part-time members, providing more work-life balance for our full-time members, and winning cost-of-living adjustments to compensate for inflation, so that all our members can actually afford to live in Chicago.
• Students for International Labor Solidarity (SILS): I am actively putting what I learned in doing my research for Strategizing Against Sweatshops into practice by working with SILS. I worked to start a chapter at Loyola, helping to organize a workshop for students and accompanying them on their first action. We continue, both on campus and nationally, to push college administrations across the US to enforce labor rights in their apparel supply chains, including my co-leading a Chicago-wide teach-in on campus organizing and the global economy.
• The Democracy Collaborative (TDC): TDC promotes an agenda of community wealth-building (CWB), a fundamentally transformative social change strategy working to create economic democracy, community generation and control of wealth, and an ecologically sustainable society. I am co-leading the development of a curriculum on CWB for professional certificate programs, to give concerned public officials the tools they need to advance CWB as a means of building local democracy, abolishing poverty, empowering workers, fighting racism, and transitioning to ecological sustainability.
