[Brownbag] Next Monday's Colloquium: Kim Voss, "Worker Identities in a New Era of Immigration, " Monday, March 17, 2-3:30pm in 402 Barrows Hall (fwd)

[Liz Ozselcuk]

Next week's Sociology Colloquium, but may be of interest to Demography 
Brown Baggers.


liz o
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 09:04:24 -0700
From: John O'Donnell <od at berkeley.edu>
To: undisclosed-recipients:  ;
Subject: Next Monday's Colloquium: Kim Voss,
     "Worker Identities in a New Era of Immigration," Monday, March 17,
     2-3:30pm in 402 Barrows Hall


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Worker Identities in a New Era of Immigration



Since 1990, immigrants and their children have been the fastest growing component of
the American population and their presence is profoundly altering the nation’s racial
and ethnic landscape. Nowhere are such changes as profound as in the workplaces of
California, where the number of immigrant workers exceeds that of every other state.
Yet little research has assessed how these immigrants understand social hierarchy in
America or how their workplace presence might be shaping both their own identities and
that of native-born workers. In this talk, which draws on research done with Fabiana
Silva, I will report preliminary findings about the ways in which white and Latino
working-class Californians construct the boundaries that define “people like me” and
“people different from me.”  Building on an approach pioneered by Michèle Lamont and
based on data from 79 in-depth interviews, I will argue that Latinos are replacing
African Americans as the most salient comparative group for whites and that this is
altering how both white and Latino workers see themselves and each other. These
changes in reference groups also appear to affect the type and strength of
distinctions workers draw between themselves and those they perceive to be in both the
upper and lower classes. Workers interviewed for this study were considerably more
critical of those above and compassionate toward those below than has been found in
prior research. These preliminary findings suggest how much workers’ identities may be
changing in today’s new era of immigration.



Kim Voss is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She
studies labor, social movements, and social inequality. Her research has appeared in
leading journals, as well as in several books, including Rallying for Immigrant
Rights: The Fight for Inclusion in 21st Century America (coedited with Irene
Bloemraad, University of California Press 2011), Hard Work: Remaking the America Labor
Movement (with Rick Fantasia, University of California Press 2004), Rebuilding Labor:
Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement (co-edited with Ruth Milkman,
Cornell University Press 2004), Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth
(with 5 Berkeley colleagues, Princeton University Press 1996), and The Making of
American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth
Century (Cornell University Press, 1993). Aside from the project discussed in the
talk, her current research focuses on the framing of immigrant rights (with Irene
Bloemraad and Fabiana Silva) and the shifting competitiveness of college admissions,
including a collaborative project on access and post-college outcomes for freshman
cohorts between 1982-2004 (with Kristin George and Mike Hout).



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