Browsing by Subject "Labor"

Following World War II, in the estimate of the Congress of Industrial

Organizations (CIO), one out of every six people in the city of Gadsden, Alabama

belonged to the union, making it the “best organized CIO city in the US.” At

midcentury, as most southern communities were growing more antiunion and more

conservative, workers in this city of 60,000 in northeastern Alabama insisted that they

had the same interests as union workers elsewhere and looked to a liberal Democratic

Party and robust federal government to bolster them. In the late 2010s, little evidence

remains that Gadsden and Etowah County were once so different from the rest of the

South. White people here often vote for Republicans. Unions have all but vanished. Development officials openly brag that 94 percent of

industry in the county operates unorganized.

A visitor to Gadsden today might find it hard to believe that the community was

once perhaps the most pro-CIO city the world has ever known. Yet those who came to

study Gadsden in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to see it as a union town, like the

famous American author John Dos Passos, had to reckon with a transformation even

more difficult to conceive: just a few years before their arrival, the city was perhaps the

most anti-CIO town in the country. In the mid-to-late 1930s, it was dangerous to give

even tacit support to the federation. On more than one occasion, workers joined with

police and civic leaders to literally run organizers out of Alabama. But this antiunionism

represented even yet another sea change: in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Gadsden had

also been something like a union town.

The purpose of this dissertation is to use Gadsden as a case study to come to

terms with the historical forces that have turned its feeling about unions upside down

and inside out. When the residents of Gadsden changed their minds

about unionism, for the most part, they did so as a community. This consensus was not

the result of shared values; neither was it compelled by the dominance of local elites. It

was, to the contrary, an outcome of Gadsden’s relationship to the out-of-town capitalists

who sustained it. For all but a few exceptional years in the twentieth century (when

Gadsden could be a union town), residents here have had to fight for capital against

people from communities like their own. In both of the cases in which this working class

city has forsaken unionism, it was because, and only because, that was what American capitalism demanded of it.

This dissertation examines how un(der)employed South Korean young adults maintain optimism in their pursuit of a “good life” that itself is contingent on regular employment. Based on fieldwork about everyday economic insecurity in neoliberal Seoul, I propose that the labor invested to keep their employability viable includes a labor of the voice. I examine how my informants cultivate the aesthetic, poetic, and communicative qualities of their voice in order to get ahead in a world in which quantitative assessments, communicative labor exchange, and technological mediation—the “digitalities of neoliberalism”—confer value on particular kinds of voice. I attend to the shifting demands that inform what one’s voice can do or should be (or not) to be aurally recognized as an employable subject, arguing for how this conceptual instability keeps Koreans’ aspirational pursuits continuously unfinished, and their social mobility largely horizonal. Listening durationally to how my informants’ vocal articulations register this potential, this dissertation critiques the teleological orientations of neoliberal (im)possibility that aurally implicates their voice and limits their futurity otherwise. Terming this specific process “analog optimism,” I propose that laboring (over the voice) is a process which continuously hints at the qualitative capaciousness of more life, both in the future and the meantime, even as the rationalized logics of a knowledge economy compresses the vitality of life, reduces time for pleasure, incites exhaustion, and complicates their status as a liberal human.

A fire in Salem, Mass., in 1914 and an explosion in Halifax, N.S., in 1917 provide an opportunity to explore working-class institutions and organizations in the United States-Canada borderlands. In a historical moment in which the state greatly expanded its responsibility to give protection and rescue to its citizens, after these two disasters ordinary survivors preferred to depend on their friends, neighbors, and family members. This dissertation examines which institutions--including formal organizations like unions and fraternal societies as well as informal groups like families and neighborhoods--were most relevant and useful to working-class survivors. Families, neighbors, friends, and coworkers had patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity that they developed before crisis hit their cities. Those traditions were put to unusual purposes and extreme stress when the disasters happened. They were also challenged by new agents of the state, who were given extraordinary powers in the wake of the disasters. This dissertation describes how the working-class people who most directly experienced the disasters understood them and their cities starkly differently than the professionalized relief authorities.

Using a wide array of sources--including government documents, published accounts, archived ephemeral, oral histories, photographs, newspapers in two languages, and the case files of the Halifax Relief Commission--the dissertation describes how elites imposed a progressive state on what they imagined to be a fractured and chaotic social landscape. It argues that "the people" for whom reformers claimed to speak had their own durable, alternative modes of support and rescue that they quickly and effectively mobilized in times of crisis, but which remained illegible to elites. By demonstrating the personal, ideological, political, and practical ties between New England and Nova Scotia and Quebec, it also emphasizes the importance of studying American and Canadian history together, not only comparatively but as a transnational, North American whole.

This is a dissertation about identity and governance, and how they are mutually constituted. Between 1838 and 1917, the British brought approximately half a million East Indian laborers to the Atlantic to work on sugar plantations. The dissertation argues that contrary to previous historiographical assumptions, indentured East Indians were an amorphous mass of people drawn from various regions of British India. They were brought together not by their innate "Indian-ness" upon their arrival in the Caribbean, but by the common experience of indenture recruitment, transportation and plantation life. Ideas of innate "Indian-ness" were products of an imperial discourse that emerged from and shaped official approaches to governing East Indians in the Atlantic. Government officials and planters promoted visions of East Indians as "primitive" subjects who engaged in child marriage and wife murder. Officials mobilized ideas about gender to sustain racialized stereotypes of East Indian subjects. East Indian women were thought to be promiscuous, and East Indian men were violent and depraved (especially in response to East Indian women's promiscuity). By pointing to these stereotypes about East Indians, government officials and planters could highlight the promise of indenture as a civilizing mechanism. This dissertation links the study of governance and subject formation to complicate ideas of colonial rule as static. It uncovers how colonial processes evolved to handle the challenges posed by migrant populations.

The primary architects of indenture, Caribbean governments, the British Colonial Office, and planters hoped that East Indian indentured laborers would form a stable and easily-governed labor force. They anticipated that the presence of these laborers would undermine the demands of Afro-Creole workers for higher wages and shorter working hours. Indenture, however, was controversial among British liberals who saw it as potentially hindering the creation of a free labor market, and abolitionists who also feared that indenture was a new form of slavery. Using court records, newspapers, legislative documents, bureaucratic correspondence, memoirs, novels, and travel accounts from archives and libraries in Britain, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago, this dissertation explores how indenture was envisioned and constantly re-envisioned in response to its critics. It chronicles how the struggles between the planter class and the colonial state for authority over indentured laborers affected the way that indenture functioned in the British Atlantic. In addition to focusing on indenture's official origins, this dissertation examines the actions of East Indian indentured subjects as they are recorded in the imperial archive to explore how these people experienced indenture.

Indenture contracts were central to the justification of indenture and to the creation of a pliable labor force in the Atlantic. According to English common law, only free parties could enter into contracts. Indenture contracts limited the period of indenture and affirmed that laborers would be remunerated for their labor. While the architects of indenture pointed to contracts as evidence that indenture was not slavery, contracts in reality prevented laborers from participating in the free labor market and kept the wages of indentured laborers low. Further, in late nineteenth-century Britain, contracts were civil matters. In the British Atlantic, indentured laborers who violated the terms of their contracts faced criminal trials and their associated punishments such as imprisonment and hard labor. Officials used indenture contracts to exploit the labor and limit the mobility of indentured laborers in a manner that was reminiscent of slavery but that instead established indentured laborers as subjects with limited rights. The dissertation chronicles how indenture contracts spawned a complex inter-imperial bureaucracy in British India, Britain, and the Caribbean that was responsible for the transportation and governance of East Indian indentured laborers overseas.

This dissertation examines the conjuncture of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and migrant social life in the urban space of Beijing as a problematic of what Foucault called biopower, where distinct logics of market and state power deploy techniques of civil society and culture in the form of public-private partnerships. The unique effect of this conjuncture is an expanding logic of power that obfuscates lines of antagonism between capital and labor, requiring new theoretical and methodological insight into how power, resistance, and antagonism might be conceived in the biopolitical era.

Drawing on recent work on biopower and new theories of antagonism and subjectivity, I argue (following Badiou's work) that both power and resistance must be articulated in their divided tendencies, which allows us to work through how certain tendencies may be contradictory and complementary, and to redraw the lines of antagonism at the level of subjectivity in terms of these divided tendencies. These lines of antagonism don't fall between public/private, market/state, or civil society/state, but along a process by which subjectivities are produced and sustained at a "distance" from the logic of their placement in society, or integrated into power by various strategies of civil society and culture. The practices and theoretical productions of one migrant cultural organization in Beijing, whose project centers on the production of new migrant subjectivity and culture in the transformation of self and society, provides insight into how we might conceive of politics as new forms of "distance" from the logic of biopower.

Through over twelve months of intensive fieldwork from 2010-2011 and follow up trips the following year on the intersection between Corporate Social Responsibility and migrant social life in Beijing, I trace the techniques by which antagonistic subjectivity is intervened upon. First, I examine the surrounding discourses, logics, and conditions of knowledge production on culture that inform the projects of migrant subjectivity from a historical perspective, and reveal a theoretical impasse in the displacement and disavowal of revolutionary culture to grapple with how to re-think antagonistic contradictions in the pervading market logic of difference. The continuation of this impasse into the biopolitical era is brought into focus through the state and market turn to "culture industries" that include, mirror, and delimit migrant social life in Beijing. Problematizing the rise of self-articulated migrant subjectivity and migrant culture amidst these public-private projects, I then turn to the practices of one migrant organization whose project draws upon a legacy of struggle for self-organized and self-run migrant collective practices to successfully confront and block a situation of forced demolition and displacement. Analyzing how elements from state, market, and "civil society" interacted through public-private partnerships in the situation of daily migrant struggles, I identify the importance of the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility in the urban space of Beijing and the growth of biopolitical practices of intervention upon the migrant issue. I argue that the effect of the diffusion of Corporate Social Responsibility as a social practice is to enroll migrants as active participants in a social life that makes their subjectivities and productive activities visible to the public sphere. Lines of antagonism can thus be drawn by taking up distinctions between subjectivities oriented toward "the public," "self-governance," and the CSR "community," versus collective self-organizing. I conclude by arguing that if biopower seeks to mirror practices of resistance and power by drawing upon the self-activities of cooperative subjects, then thinking about the self-organized and self-run migrant organization as a new form of "distance" may shed light on how antagonism and political struggle might be redefined today.

Young people in Japan contend with shifting understandings of family and friends, insecure jobs, and changing frames around global and national identities. The category of youth itself is unsettled amid a long period of social and economic change and perceived widely as crisis. Within contested social categories of youth, how do young Japanese people use the city, media, and body practices to create flexible, meaningful sociality across spaces of work, education, and play? What do youthful sociality and practices reveal about globally oriented connections and how do they inform conceptions of the future, kinship, gender, and pluralized identities? In short, what is the embodied and affective experience of being young as the category itself is increasingly unstable and full of risks? These questions shape the contours of this project.

This dissertation considers youth through its becoming, that is, the lived enactment of youth as energy, emotion, and sensibility always in motion and within range of cultural, spatial, bodily, and technological forces. Three groups of young people in this layered latitudinal study demonstrate various relations to the city street, visual media, globalized identities, contingent work within affect and cultural production, and education. The three groups are distinctly different but share surprising points of connection.

I lived alongside these three groups to understand the ways young people are innovating within the shifting form of youth. I skated with male skateboarders in their teens to early 30s who created Japan's most influential skate company; I taught kids attending a specialized cram school for kikokushijo (children who have lived abroad due to a parent's job assignment); I observed and hung out with young creative workers, the photographers, web designers, and graphic artists who produce the visual and textual content and relationships composing commercial "youth culture."

My project examines how these young people redefine youth through bodily practices, identities, and economic de/attachments. The skaters' embodied actions distribute/dissipate their energies in risky ways outside formal structures of labor. The kikokushijo children, with their bi-cultural fluency produced in circuits of capitalist labor, offer a desirable image of a flexible Japanese future while their heterogeneous identities appear threatening in the present. The creative workers are precariously positioned as "affective labor" within transglobal (youth) cultural production, working to generate visual and textual content constant stressful uncertainties. All three groups share uneasy ground with capitalist practices, risky social identities, and crucially, intimate relations with city space. In attending to their practices through ethnographic participation and video, this dissertation explores questions concerning youthful relations to space produced in material contacts, remembered geographies of other places and imaginary urban sites.

The dissertation itself is electronic and non-linear; a formal enactment of the drifting contact between forms of youth. It opens up to lines of connection between questions, sites, events, and bodies and attempts an unfolding of affect, imagination, and experience to tell stories about histories of gender and labor, city life, and global dreams. It asks if the globalized forms of Japanese youth avoid the risks of the impossible secure for the open possibilities of becoming and thus refuse containment by crisis?

I study the effect of human capital on firms' leverage decisions in a structural dynamic model. Firms produce using physical capital and labor. They pay a cost per employee they hire, thus investing in human capital. In default a portion of this human capital investment is lost. The loss of human capital constitutes a significant cost of financial distress. Labor intensive firms are more heavily exposed to this cost and respond by using less leverage. Thus the model predicts a decreasing relationship between leverage and labor intensity. Consistent with this prediction, I show in the data that high labor intensity leads to significantly less use of debt. In the model a move from the lowest to the highest decile of labor intensity is accompanied by a drop in leverage of 21 percentage points, very close to the 27 percentage point drop in the data. Overall, I argue that human capital has an important effect on firm leverage and should receive more attention from capital structure researchers.

Furthermore, I study a two-period contracting problem in which entrepreneurs need financing but have limited commitment. If an entrepreneur chooses to default, he can divert a proportion of the project's output. Entrepreneurs are heterogeneous with respect to their ability to divert output. In particular, I focus on the special case with only two types of entrepreneurs. "Opportunistic'' entrepreneurs can divert output, but "dependable'' entrepreneurs cannot. I find that, if the proportion of dependable entrepreneurs is sufficiently high, it is optimal to write contracts that induce second period default by the opportunistic entrepreneurs. This critical proportion generally decreases with the severity of the agency problem. The model delivers both cross-sectional and time-series predictions about default, investment, and output.

This dissertation studies three questions in which economic behavior at the firm level plays an important role. Chapter 2 studies how individual owner-managers shape firm conduct in the labor market. I use survey and administrative microdata from the U.S. Census to link firm and worker outcomes to the past local unemployment rate exposure (URE) of owner-managers. Using a difference in differences approach centered on changes in firm ownership, I find that firms acquired by high URE owner-managers increase worker earnings on average while displaying no differential trends in firm employment. These results also hold in worker-level analysis, which reveals that firm-level differences are driven in part by immediate pay increases for older and more educated workers, resulting in greater retention among these cohorts. These results are further validated among firms that do not experience ownership changes. Using an instrumental variables design, I find that URE is associated with greater rent-sharing at the firm level. Together, these results demonstrate that owner-managers have substantial scope to determine pay and hiring policy at their firms.

Chapter 3, coauthored with Mark Curtis, Daniel Garrett, Eric Ohrn, and Juan Carlos Suarez Serrato, studies plant-level responses to a large federal tax incentive, known as bonus depreciation, that lowered the cost of capital investment. Difference-in-differences estimates using confidential Census Data on manufacturing establishments show that tax policies increased both investment and employment, but did not stimulate wage or productivity growth. Using a structural model, we find that the primary effect of the policy was to increase the use of all inputs by lowering costs of production and that capital and production workers are complementary inputs in modern manufacturing. Our results show that tax policies that incentivize capital investment do not lead manufacturing plants to replace workers with machines.

The fourth chapter assesses how state and local taxes influence firm entry decisions in the video gambling industry in Illinois, which comprises almost 7,000 establishments each operating up to five slot machine-like gambling terminals. Using variation in local gambling ordinances and an event-study framework, I estimate that gambling legalization leads on average to a 3.0% increase in local tax revenue and a noisy 1.6% increase in local spending. I then develop and estimate an equilibrium model of entry and exit to explore the effects of counterfactual tax increases. Simulations reveal that uniform increases in the marginal tax rate increase tax revenue while reducing the extent to which gambling establishments select into low-income neighborhoods. Taken together, these results suggest that taxation can effectively offset the regressivity of gambling activity if revenue is effectively targeted to local governments.

Between 2015 and 2019, approximately 1.8 million Venezuelans fled into neighboring Colombia, increasing Colombia’s population by almost 4%. In this dissertation, I study the effects of this large and unprecedented migration wave on Colombian labor market outcomes and attitudes towards foreigners. In Chapter 1, I study the economic effects of the migration using variation in the migration rate across 79 metropolitan areas, labor survey data, and an instrumental variable strategy based on historical migration rates. I find that Venezuelan migration caused a moderate decrease in the hourly wages of native Colombians that is most concentrated among low-wage and informal workers. Existing studies of this migration wave using similar methods and data have estimated different magnitudes for this wage effect, and I demonstrate the differences in specification that drive these discrepancies. In Chapter 2, I study the consequences of migrant occupational downgrading by estimating an aggregate production function that incorporates imperfect substitutability between migrants and natives and migrant occupational downgrading. I find that downgrading concentrates economic competition among less educated natives and decreases output in both the short- and long-term, thus affecting both wage equality and productivity. In Chapter 3, I study the effect of migration on trust towards foreigners using a nationwide survey on social preferences. While migration has no effect on trust on average, the effect is positive in municipalities that are more urbanized, have greater access to high-quality public goods, and where there is more residential integration between migrants and natives.

What happens when the dominant binary categories used to describe American race relations--either "black and white," or "Anglo and Mexican"--are examined contemporaneously, not comparatively, but in relation to one another? How do the long African American and Chicano/a struggles for racial equality and economic opportunity look different? And what role did ordinary people play in shaping these movements? Using oral history interviews, the Texas Labor Archives, and the papers of dozens of black, brown, and white activists, this dissertation follows diverse labor, civil rights, and political organizers from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s.

Tracing their movements revealed a startling story. Beginning in the mid-1930s, African American and ethnic Mexican working people across Texas quietly and tentatively approached one another as well as white laborers for support in their efforts to counter discrimination at work, in their unions, and in the cities in which they lived. Such efforts evolved in different ways due to the repression of the early Cold War, but most organizers simply redirected their activism into new channels. By the close of the 1950s, new forms of multiracial alliances were beginning to take hold. Mutual suspicion slowly gave way to mutual trust, especially in San Antonio. There, and increasingly statewide, black and brown activists separately developed robust civil rights movements that encompassed demands not only for integration but also equal economic opportunities and the quest for independent political power.

The distinct civil rights and labor movements overlapped, especially in the realm of electoral politics. By the mid-1960s, what began as inchoate collaboration at the local level had gradually expanded from its origins in the barrios, ghettos, union halls, and shop floors to become a broad-based, state-wide coalition in support of liberal politicians and an expansive civil rights agenda. At the same time, African American and ethnic Mexican activists were engaged in new waves of organizing for both political power and civil rights, but they encountered opposition from members of their own ethnic groups. Thus the activists' efforts to forge inter-ethnic coalitions coexisted with protracted intra-ethnic conflict. In many cases distinctions of class and political philosophy and tactics mattered at least as much as did ties of ethnicity. Activists learned this lesson experientially: in the trenches, through countless small conflicts over several decades, they slowly separated themselves from their more conservative counterparts and looked to multiracial coalitions as their primary strategy for outflanking their intra-ethnic opponents. Meanwhile, organized labor and white liberals had been searching for allies in their efforts to wrest control of the Democratic Party away from its conservative wing. In the early 1960s, they reached the conclusion that black and brown voters would prove key to their own success, so they gradually transitioned toward civil rights organizing in order to build a coalition with the black and brown civil rights movements.

After decades of fighting separately and dabbling in experimental partnerships, veteran ethnic Mexican, African American, and white labor and liberal activists finally came together into a powerful statewide Democratic Coalition. Between 1962 and 1964, their collaborative campaign for civil rights, economic opportunity, and political power reached a fever pitch, resulting in the state's largest ever direct action protests, massive door-to-door electoral initiatives, and an ever-deepening commitment by labor to putting boots on the ground for community organizing. In the late 1960s the statewide multiracial coalition reached its apex and began to lose steam. At the same time, local multiracial coalitions continued to thrive, underpinning both the African American and Chicano/a urban electoral mobilizations and the rising Black and Brown Power movements. At the local level and in the short term, black, brown, and white working-class civil rights activists won--they achieved a degree of economic and political democracy in Texas that was scarcely imaginable in the age of Jim Crow just a few decades earlier. But as they won local battles they also lost the larger war.

Working-class civil rights organizers thus failed in the end to democratize Texas and America. Their goals remain distant to this day. Yet they were themselves transformed by their experiences in the struggle. Most transitioned from near-complete political and economic exclusion to having a voice. Their collective story indicates that scholars have much to gain from studying organized labor, electoral politics, and the African American and ethnic Mexican civil rights movements simultaneously. Doing so not only adds to the emerging historical sub-field of black-brown relations but also makes each of the individual movements look different. It reconnects class to the black freedom struggle, militancy to the ethnic Mexican civil rights movement, organized labor to community activism, and all three movements to the creation of today's urban politics.

Just over 300 years have passed since John Locke proposed that the basis of the individual was property and, in turn, that the labor which was the individual’s first property in his own person was the source of all property he accumulates. Labor, in other words, and the property it produces would transform the subject into the independent individual of the liberal imaginary. When we turn to the realist novel, however, labor is notoriously absent, as if to make us aspire to a way of life in which we do not work for money but our money works for us. While the novel suggests that, to become an individual with a story to tell, one must transcend the world of work; liberal political economic theory argues that it takes work, as well as our capacity and will to do it, to become a full-fledged individual. To turn principle into paradox, the novel draws on romance as the means of redefining work as the obstacle rather than the means of rising in the field of social relations. Romance incites the individual to find a position apart if not above work, often in a household where one finds self-completion in a union with an ideal other. In this way, romance provides the foundation for a domestic sphere that restores the individual’s body and spirit by means of the freely given labor of love. As it reimagined the single-family household as a site of social reproduction, the novels of the Victorian period also leant both tangibility and accessibility to an apparatus that ensured that the relations of capitalist production would be reproduced down through the generations. Labored Romance: The Contemporary Novel and the Culture of Late Capitalism begins by showing how a classic work of realism, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, stages a struggle between the necessity of labor as the foundation of value and the work of romance as the transcending of waged labor. If the struggle between work and romance is realism’s legacy, then contemporary fiction calls attention to the fact that romance is missing from the novels that vie for critical recognition today. At the same time, these novels put not only the protagonists but virtually the entire field of characters to work and, indeed, they do little else. Given that novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder are not only works of fantastic fiction, the question is why? In the contemporary novel, both traditional romance and the household that constituted a world apart—a space of love without labor—has all but disappeared while labor is all but impossible to avoid. Instead of a space of personal gratification and replenishment, these novels offer us a virtually boundless workplace that has subsumed both the trappings and functions of the home. On the other hand, the discourse of romance, at once indexed to and detached from the household, is attached to and integrated into waged work. How, in its appropriation of many of the reproductive functions once served by the household, does information work make use of the infectious properties of romance? What purpose does romance now serve if not to compel and sanctify the composition of the basic consumer unit, the heteronormative family? These are the questions that Labored Romance asks of three contemporary novels published during the first decade of the present century.

This dissertation centers on Antillean women’s brushes with the French colonial state in nineteenth-century Martinique and Guadeloupe. It argues that while nineteenth-century French Caribbean of African descent women were, by and large, ignored by colonial authorities—unsurprisingly, considered less-than-citizens and, more surprisingly, seldom targeted for or involved in interventions aimed at ‘moral uplift’—they found myriad ways to enact citizenship and forms of belonging. Close analysis of women’s encounters with colonial power in the French Antilles reveals the ways in which gender shaped the contours of women’s political subjectivities. Anchored and intervening in the broad, overlapping fields of Caribbean history, French imperial history, women’s and gender history, and labor history, this dissertation examines subaltern women’s political praxis as they engaged in the realm of reproduction writ large in the midst of their work in both plantation labor and non-plantation waged labor. I argue that, through these engagements, women often offered visions of home and citizenship that transcended the commodifying logics of slavery, racial capitalism, and colonialism.

“Making Socialism Work: The Shchekino Method and the Drive to Modernize Soviet Industry” examines factory-level efforts to improve socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century. It does so to understand Soviet socialism’s capacity to evolve. Drawing on national and regional archival documents and newspapers, it contests the argument that the Soviet system was too rigid to survive in the world of computerized, post-Fordist production. By focusing on labor in the enterprise, it reveals that many of the characteristics typically associated with capitalist flexible production were present in the Soviet Union by the mid-1960s. To the extent that flexible production represents the social corollary of neoliberal political theory, “Making Socialism Work” helps to explain continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet political economies.

This dissertation focuses on the experiences of children who work the streets of Lima primarily as jugglers, musicians, and candy vendors. I explore how children's everyday lives are marked not only by the hardships typically associated with poverty, but also by their need to respond to the dominant notions of childhood, family roles, and urban order that make them into symbols of underdevelopment. In particular, I argue that transnational discourses about the perniciousness of child labor, articulated through development agencies, NGOs, the Peruvian state, the media, and everyday interpersonal exchanges, perpetuate an idea of childhood that not only fails to correspond to the realities of the children that I came to know, but that reinscribes a view of them and their families as impediments to progress and thus available for diverse forms of moral intervention. I ground my analysis in a notion that I call "public childhoods." This concept draws attention to the ways that subjectivities form through intersecting mechanisms of power, in this sense capturing nuances that common terms such as "street children" and "child laborer" gloss over. Children, I show, are a symbolic site for the articulation of the kinds of classed, raced and gendered differences that characterize Lima's contemporary urban imaginary. As they bear the embodied effects of such discourses, I argue, children who work the streets also participate - if in subtle ways - in these everyday ideological struggles into which they are drawn.

My dissertation is based on twenty-two months of fieldwork in Peru, in addition to several one- and two-month periods of preliminary and follow-up research. As an ethnographer, my research consisted primarily of accompanying children as they went about their daily routines. Beyond "hanging out" in their workspaces, which included a busy traffic intersection in an upper-middle class district and public buses, I also spent a great deal of time with the children's families, typically in their homes in Lima's shantytowns and working-class neighborhoods. I also attended meetings and otherwise participated in institutional spaces such as NGOs, social movements, Congressional hearings, and advocacy groups. Finally, in order to gain a more long-term perspective on discussions and policies involving childhood, I conducted research in Lima's historical archives.

“Redistributing Risk” explains how coal, which powered the industrial revolution, continued to be a linchpin of U.S. energy production long into the post-industrial era. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coal fueled everything from railroad engines to the foundries that forged the steel on which they rode. But the market for coal dwindled during the middle of the twentieth century, and by the 1960s many Americans viewed it as a relic of a dirty and dangerous industrial past. Surprisingly, the industry rebounded during the 1970s, when concerns about energy supplies pushed policymakers and electricity producers to renew the nation’s reliance on coal. In the forty years since, new technology has amplified demand for electricity, and coal has powered yet another revolution in the global political economy. Ironically, a fuel that mid-century observers saw as a thing of the past actually illuminated their future.

I argue that the key to the industry’s success during the 1970s was a redistribution of the risks associated with coal mining. By the late 1960s, the danger of underground mining was among the industry’s greatest liabilities. High death rates from workplace accidents and the millions disabled by respiratory diseases like coal miners’ pneumoconiosis (commonly referred to as black lung) contributed significantly to coal’s poor reputation. Death rates began to plummet after Congress passed the first comprehensive federal mine safety law in 1969, but miners’ efforts to enforce safety through work stoppages and the pressure to stabilize productivity led operators toward a greater reliance on surface methods, which were safer for workers but more dangerous for nearby communities, ecosystems, and—with the later spread of mountaintop removal—to the mountains themselves.

Perhaps second only to coffee, Ethiopia is best known worldwide for its long-distance runners. Since the 1960s, the country has indeed won countless Olympic medals and major marathons. However, the persisting explanatory rhetoric for East African running dominance relies on deterministic understandings of race, genetics, and environment. Little attention has been paid to the dimensions of labor, culture, and gender at work. This dissertation is the first in-depth ethnographic study of young Ethiopian women seeking a career in long distance running.

Based on two years of fieldwork in Addis Ababa and surrounding areas, domestic trips to competitions and training camps around Ethiopia, an internship at an international sports agency based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and travel to competitions around the world, the dissertation investigates the transnational networks of people and corporations that female runners move within and across as they navigate a global athletics market. Foregrounding gender, body politics, and global capitalism, my project revises the biology-centered concept of “running economy” into a multi-faceted sociocultural analytic for exploring how aspiring runners strive to make monetary value. How, I ask, can we look at running economy more holistically?

In underlining the social and cultural dimensions of running economy and centering the perspectives of women who exist within the transnational economy of running, we can see how Ethiopian women contest commonsense understandings of how this global athletics economy functions – and make their own moral judgements about what a more just economy would look like. Even as some of them drastically improve their lives by running, and remain hopeful while reaching for success, they find ways to cause frictions and disrupt hegemonic flows of ideas and money. By listening to how they politicize their training as labor, and by hearing their demands and desires, I argue that Ethiopian women runners expose many of the failed opportunities that capitalist structures and ideology espouse and urge us to rethink how we could better structure transnational economies.

“Silencing the Cell Block” examines the relationship between imprisoned activists and civil liberties lawyers from the 1960s to the present in order to solve a puzzle central to the United States’ peculiar criminal justice system: Why do American prisons, despite affording inmates expansive due process protections, continue to punish more harshly than their counterparts in any Western country? To answer this question, “Silencing the Cell Block” begins by tracing the emergence of an interracial movement to unionize imprisoned workers in North Carolina and across the nation. Inspired by robust public sector labor and Black Power organizing campaigns, inmates sought a wide range of improvements, including freedom from racism and violence, fair wages, the abolition of large penal institutions, and a voice in prison governance. It then demonstrates how lawyers’ efforts to establish due process protections for prisoners unintentionally undermined inmates’ ability to organize and secure more substantive victories. In the early 1970s, civil liberties lawyers, moved by the broader due process revolution, shielded inmates from the worst abuses behind bars by winning cases compelling prisons to institute disciplinary hearings, grievance procedures, and other procedural protections designed to curtail arbitrary authority. At first, state officials adamantly opposed such improvements. But as the prisoners’ movement garnered strength and courts threatened increased intervention, they came to embrace internal grievance procedures as weapons to defeat inmates’ more sweeping demands. Ultimately, procedural reforms allowed state officials to convince judges that state penal institutions operated as modern bureaucracies that complied with the rule of law. By advocating for new procedural protections that offered the appearance—though not always the reality—of justice, civil liberties lawyers sympathetic to the prisoners’ cause helped make America’s severe prison practices more difficult to dismantle.