SOC 349
Race, Gender, and Labor Spring 2025
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity

This course draws on approaches from sociology, labor studies, and Black studies to examine the historical and contemporary intersections of race, gender, and labor. In particular, we will explore the racial, classed, and gendered dimensions of the labor movement, historic economic shifts that impacted and reorganized U.S. labor regimes, Black labor in slavery’s afterlife as it relates to prisons, and global analyses of racialized gendered labor regimes for migrant and immigrant labor within the Global South and the U.S. We will begin the course by grounding ourselves in the Black feminist framework of intersectionality, which will guide our analyses of the intersections of race, class, and gender in labor formations. We will then focus on the monumental shift in labor relations that enslaved Black people’s toppling of the plantation system in the US South brought forth, as well as the technologies of re-enslavement instituted as a reaction to Black people’s emancipation. After that, we will move through different themes and time periods, considering how race, gender, and class intersect in regimes of labor exploitation and the successes and setbacks of labor movements.