Faculty Fellow Lecture Series: Jaira J. Harrington, Black Studies: “Between Dreams, Myths and Reality: Domestic Work, Unions, and Anti-Blackness in São Paulo”
Faculty Fellow Lecture Series
October 9, 2024
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileIn this lecture, Jaira J. Harrington explores the barriers toward the recognition of domestic workers' unions as a legitimate labor movement in São Paulo, Brazil. Domestic work is a labor market that is overwhelmingly composed of Black women. Caught between the intersections of racial capitalism and sexism, domestic workers and their unions have been rendered invisible. From her interviews with São Paulo's municipal Domestic Workers’ Union, she finds that union members, participants, and leaders shape their own liberatory analytical framework around their marginalization. Their framing pushes back against Eurocentric, Marxist ideas of labor that center the mythical male, hardworking European, industrial, and immigrant laborer.
Jaira J. Harrington is an assistant professor of Black Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on the political activism of Latin American Black communities, diasporic Black feminism, and race, class and labor organizing among Brazilian domestic workers. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, Fulbright, and American Academy of University Women. Jaira is completing her first book Inscribed and Erased: Domestic Workers’ Rights in Brazil with the UIC Institute for the Humanities.
Date posted
May 22, 2024
Date updated
Sep 13, 2024