BCRW: The Barnard Center for Research on Women

About the Contributors

Eileen Boris is Hull Professor and Chair of the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she directs the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice. An interdisciplinary historian, she specializes in women's labors in the home and other workplaces and on gender, race, work, and the welfare state. Among her many books are Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States [winner of the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History]; Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and Politics of Care, co-edited with Rhacel Parreñas (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2010); and, with Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2011). She has authored policy reports on the feminization of poverty, the wages of care, and welfare reform. She serves on the board of CAUSE, Coastal Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy. Her non-academic writings have appeared in The Nation, The LA Times, New Labor Forum, Salon, Dissent and The Washington Post.

Christine E. Bose is Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY and holds joint appointments in Women's Studies and in Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies. She edited the journal Gender & Society (2000-2003), was President of Sociologists for Women in Society (2006), and has published eight books on issues of stratification, globalization, and gender inequality, with a specific focus on the intersections of women's paid and unpaid work and their relationships to class, and race or ethnicity/nationality. Recently, she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Costa Rica (2008) and has published, with Minjeong Kim, Global Gender Research: Transnational Perspectives (Routledge 2009).

Arlie Russell Hochschild is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of several prize-winning books and numerous articles on balancing home and work, including The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, and The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home.

Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) is a membership-based organization founded in 1990. JFREJ engages Jews to pursue and win racial and economic justice in partnership with Jewish and allied people of color, low-income and immigrant communities in New York City. Shalom Bayit: Justice for Domestic Workers is a JFREJ campaign (in partnership with Domestic Workers United) to bring Jews into the struggle for dignity, respect and better working conditions for domestic workers. Visit JFREJ's website for more information.

Jennifer Klein, BC '89, is Professor of History at Yale University, where she teaches courses in urban history, labor history, and 20th century American politics and society. Her book, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State, won the Ellis Hawley Prize and Hagley Prize. Her forthcoming book, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State, co-authored with Eileen Boris, will be published next year by Oxford University Press. She sits on the editorial board of International Labor and Working-Class History. Her articles have appeared in Dissent, New Labor Forum, CNN.com, and various academic journals.

Wendy Kozol is a professor of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College where she teaches courses on feminist theory and visual culture. Recent publications include "Visual Witnessing and Women's Human Rights," in Peace Review (2008), and a co-edited anthology (with Wendy Hesford): Just Advocacy: Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminism and the Politics of Representation (2005).

Pei-Chia Lan is Associate Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Her book, Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006), has won the 2007 Distinguished Book Award given by the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and the 2006-7 ICAS (International Convention of Asian Scholars) Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science.

Premilla Nadasen is associate professor of history at Queens College (CUNY). Her first book, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge 2005), won the John Hope Franklin Prize awarded by the American Studies Association. In 2006-2007 she served as first Visiting Endowed Chair of Women's Studies at Brooklyn College. A longtime community activist and scholar, she has worked with numerous social justice organizations, including Domestic Workers United. She recently testified as an expert witness before the New York State Assembly Labor Committee about the proposed Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights. She has written for Feminist Studies, the Women's Review of Books, Race and Reason, Ms. Magazine, and the Progressive Media Project. In addition, she has given numerous public talks about African-American women's history, welfare policy, and labor organizing. She is currently writing a book on the history of domestic worker organizing in the United States.

The National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) is a vehicle to build power nationally as a workforce. Founded at the U.S. Social Forum in 2007, NDWA is organizing to improve the living and working conditions of domestic workers; win respect and justice from employers and government for exploited domestic workers; change the racism and sexism that has led to the persistent devaluing of this labor so that dignity of domestic work is honored; end the exclusion of domestic workers from recognition and protection; build a movement of migrant workers to fight the labor displacement and exploitation created by globalization; and continue a brave legacy of resistance by supporting movement-building among domestic workers and other communities and workers in struggle. Visit NDWA's website for more information.

Leah Obias is a community organizer and caseworker for Damayan Migrant Workers Association, a membership-based, grassroots organization of Filipino women workers, mainly domestic workers. Damayan is a proud member of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Leah's casework includes recovery of stolen wages, seeking justice for gender violence, and immigrant protection. Under the leadership of the women workers, she also assists in Damayan's campaigns and solid organizing.

Ai-jen Poo has been organizing immigrant women workers in New York since 1996. From 2000-2009 she helped found and served as Lead Organizer for Domestic Workers United, an organization of nannies, housekeepers and elderly caregivers in New York organizing for power, respect, fair labor standards and to help build a movement to end oppression for all. DWU helped to organize the first national meeting of domestic workers organizations at the U.S. Social Forum in 2007, which resulted in the formation of the National Domestic Worker Alliance. Ai-jen Poo also serves on the Board of Social Justice Leadership, the Labor Advisory Board at Cornell ILR School, and the New Labor Forum. A recent recipient of the Alston Bannerman Fellowship for Organizers of Color, she is currently on sabbatical.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her new books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2008) and A Sociology of Globalization (W.W. Norton 2007). Other recent books are the third. fully updated Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2006), the edited, Deciphering the Global (Routledge 2007), and the co-edited Digital Formations: New Architectures for Global Order (Princeton University Press 2005). She has just completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement with a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers). The Global City came out in a new fully updated edition in 2001. Her books are translated into nineteen languages. She has received several honors and awards, most recently a doctor honoris causa from Delft University and DePaul University. She serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and chaired the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, The International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, OpenDemocracy.net, Vanguardia, Clarin, The Financial Times, and HuffingtonPost.com, among others.

Third World Newsreel (TWN) is an alternative media arts organization that fosters the creation, appreciation and dissemination of independent film and video by and about people of color and social justice issues. TWN holds filmmaking workshops, initiates productions, and distributes over 400 film and video titles in order to promote the self-representation of traditionally marginalized groups as well as the negotiated representation of those groups by artists who work in solidarity with them. Visit TWN's website for more information.

Basia Winograd is a NYC-based documentary filmmaker. She studied film directing at Poland's National Film School in Lodz, and at Columbia University, where she received her MFA in 2006. Basia's documentaries have aired on Thirteen, the BBC and other national television stations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Her first film, a documentary made for Polish television in 1998, was about the lives of Polish immigrants in New York City.