Rina Agarwala is Associate Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Agarwala publishes and lectures on international development, labor, migration, gender, social movements, and Indian politics. She is the author of the award-winning book, Informal Labor, Formal Politics and Dignified Discontent in India (Cambridge, 2013) and the co-editor of Whatever Happened to Class? Reflections from South Asia (Routledge, 2008). She has published articles on informal labor, transnational movements, and gender in International Migration Review, Theory and Society, Social Forces, Journal of Industrial Relations, Political Science and Politics, Research in the Sociology of Work, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Critical Asian Studies, and Indian Journal of Labour Economics. She has also worked on international development issues at the United Nations Development Program in China, the Self-Employed Women's Association in India, and Women's World Banking in New York. Agarwala holds a B.A. in Economics and Government from Cornell University, an M.P.P. in Political and Economic Development from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.
Eloisa Betti is Research Fellow at the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna. In 2015–2016 she has been awarded the EURIAS Fellowship at the Institute for Human Science of Vienna, where she is currently working at the project, “Gender and precarious work in a historical perspective: the European context.” Her main areas of specialization are labor history, gender and women's history, and urban history. Among her recent publications are “Making working women visible in 1950s Italian labour conflict. The case of the Ducati factory,” in Myndighet Og Medborgerskap, eds. K. H. Nordberg, H. Roll-Hansen, E. Sandmo, and H. Sandvik (Novus Forlag, 2015); “Bologna in the early Cold War. Perspectives of memories from a Communist city in the West,” in Cold War Cities, eds. M. Hietala and K. Pizzi (Peter Lang, 2016).
José Luis Gayosso Ramírez holds a Ph.D. in Social Studies (Labor Studies specialization) from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Mexico), and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro. He studies informal work, urban space, and identity and collective action. His publications include “Mexico City tianguistas: informal atypical workers” (Iztapalapa Magazine, 2011); “The identity debate: Systematic past, fragmentary present?” (with Enrique de la Garza, in, Work, Identity, and Collective Action, 2010); “Work, identity, and collective action among the artisan street vendors of Coyoacán's Historical Center,” in Non-Classical Labor, vol. II (2011); “Seizure and contention for urban public space: The struggle for the defense of the artisan street market in Coyoacán's Historical Center” (Yearbook of Urban Spaces, 2013).
Bridget Kenny is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She works on labor, gender and consumption with specific focus on service work, precarious employment, and political subjectivity. She is the President of Research Committee 44–Labour Movements of the International Sociological Association (2014–2018).
Marcel van der Linden is Senior Fellow of the International Institute of Social History and Professor of Social Movement History at the University of Amsterdam.
Dr. Sarah Mosoetsa is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg. Sarah is also the executive director of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) of South Africa. She is the author of Eating from one pot: dynamics of survival in poor South African households (Wits University Press, 2011) and co-editor of Labour in the Global South: challenges and alternatives for workers (International Labor Office, 2012).
Dennie Oude Nijhuis is Assistant Professor of History at Leiden University. He has published widely on comparative labor market and welfare state development and is the other of the book Labor Divided in the Postwar European Welfare State (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is currently doing research on the emergence of dual welfare systems and the role of business in the development of the postwar welfare state.
James Oakes is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He studies the history the United States with a special interest slavery, antislavery, the Civil War, and the history of capitalism.
Marcel Paret is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Utah, and Senior Research Associate with the South African Research Chair in Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. Focusing on the politics of class formation in South Africa and the United States, his work appears in Review of African Political Economy, Critical Sociology, Citizenship Studies, Politikon, International Sociology, and Latino Studies, among others.
Hugo Sarmiento is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA. His work addresses the intersection between informal labor, social movements, and housing within the changing urban economy. Hugo has a special interest in Latin America, having completed projects focused on informal worker and immigrant organizations in Guatemala, El Salvador and Brazil. Currently, his dissertation work examines social mobilization and grassroots resistance to resettlement programs initiated by Colombian cities concerned with adapting to the effects of climate change.
Sara R. Smith received her Ph.D. in History and Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where her studies focused on labor and social movements, women's and queer history, and the history of race and racism in the United States. Her dissertation, “Organizing for Social Justice: Rank-and-File Teachers' Activism and Social Unionism in California, 1948–1978,” is a study of gender, race, and sexuality in the history of teachers' organizing in California. She is currently teaching at Berkeley City College and Sonoma State University.
Joel Stillerman is Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University. He is the author of The Sociology of Consumption: A Global Approach (Polity, 2015) and coeditor of ¿Qué significa el trabajo hoy?: Continuidad y cambio en una sociedad global (Catalonia, 2012). His publications on labor activism, consumer culture, and middle classes in Chile and Latin America appear in International Labor and Working-class History, Journal of Consumer Culture, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Political Power and Social Theory, City & Community, Qualitative Sociology, Mobilization, Social Science History, and several edited volumes.
Chris Tilly, Professor of Urban Planning and Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UCLA, studies labor and inequality in the US and global context, with a particular focus on bad jobs and how to make them better. Tilly's books include Half a Job: Bad and Good Part-Time Jobs in a Changing Labor Market; Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women's Work, Women's Poverty; Work Under Capitalism: Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America; The Gloves-Off Economy: Labor Standards at the Bottom of America's Labor Market, and Are Bad Jobs Inevitable?
Enrique de la Garza Toledo is Professor in the Graduate Program in Labor Studies at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) in Mexico, and conducts research on sociology of labor, labor relations, unions, the informal sector, methodology, and social theory. He has been a Visiting Professor at Berkeley, Cornell, and Warwick University. He is recipient of Mexico's National Award in Social Sciences, and editor of the journal Trabajo. His books include Firms and Workers in Mexico at the Beginning of the 21st Century, The Latin American Handbook of Sociology of Labor, and Non-Classical Labor, among many others.
Tracy Zhang holds a postdoctoral fellowship in Film and Media at Queen's University, Canada. Her research is concerned with the entangled politics of gender, race and cultural production in transnational settings. Previously, Dr. Zhang studied how representations of colonial lands and peoples influence the lives and work of women carpet weavers in the Tibetan capital city, Lhasa. More recently, her work explores how Chinese acrobatics, as both an institution and a cultural medium, has evolved since the 1950s from a popular entertainment to a socialist performing art, and finally, to one of China's most profitable cultural exports.
