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• 1 media/Womens_center_Pamphlet11.jpg 2021-06-15T11:02:42-07:00 Feminist Scholarship on Work and Economic Justice 11 Work and Economic Justice plain 2021-06-17T11:12:46-07:00 By the early 1980s, the S&F conferences began to focus more intentionally on modes of feminist scholarship and activism that took race, ethnicity, and class seriously. S&F VII: Class, Race, and Sex—Exploring Contradictions, Affirming Connections (April 1980) and S&F VIII: The Dynamics of Control (April 1981) both included workshops focusing on class and race specificities in the experience of work. Presentations from these two conferences were published in 1983 as Amy Swerdlow and Hanna Lessinger, eds., Class, Race, and Sex: The Dynamics of Control (The Scholar and the Feminist: Papers from the Barnard College Women’s Center Conference, vol. 2; Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983). Among the critical interventions of these conferences was an important workshop offered by Elizabeth Higginbotham, at the time an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University. The workshop entitled “Laid Bare by the System: Work and Survival for Black and Hispanic Women” took place at the 1981 Dynamics of Control conference. Here, Higginbotham offered an analytical framework that distinguished the experiences of “white ethnic” and “racial ethnic” women—a mode of categorization that insisted that class alone could not address the racial and ethnic disparities observable in the economic and work lives of different groups of women, even when they might share the same class status. Building on broad historical patterns, nationally generated statistical data, and surveys with individuals, Higginbotham made an early case for attending to racial and ethnic differences as a centerpiece of feminist scholarship about work and economic justice.    
  
  By the mid-1990s, the Scholar and the Feminist Conference XX (1994) turned again to issues of work with the organizing theme, “Women, Work, and Family in a Changing Economy.” Among the various presentations and panels, a workshop entitled “Company Works at Home: The New World of Telecommunications, Home Work, and the Impact on Women Workers” which featured presentations by Kathleen Christensen, Professor and Chair of the Environmental Psychology Program of the CUNY Graduate Center; Gil Gordon, principal of Gil Gordon Associates and Editor, Telecommuting Review; and Arlene Johnson, Vice President of the Families and Work Institute. Listening to this workshop from the vantage point of more than a year into pandemic-inspired “remote working” or “working from home,” one hears both the utopian optimism over “flexibility” and the cautionary predictions of blurred boundaries between “work” and “life.”
  
  By the first two decades of the twenty-first century, BCRW’s engagement with issues of work and economic justice came to expression in a series of short publications in the New Feminist Solutions series, reports and resource guides that summarize the findings of scholarly collaborations. Some of these reports were supplemented by more traditional scholarly work published in BCRW’s peer-reviewed scholarly journal, The Scholar and Feminist Online.  All of these publications, whether policy reports or scholarly research, grew out of conferences, symposia, and multi-year research projects headed up by Barnard faculty and BCRW staff. These publications include:
  Allison Wylie, Janet R. Jakobsen, and Gisela Fosado, Women, Work, and the Academy: Strategies for Responding to ‘Post-Civil Rights Era’ Gender Discrimination (New Feminist Solutions 2; BCRW, 2007). Gildersleeve Conference, December 9-10, 2004.
  A Better Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center and the Barnard Center for Research on Women, The Work-Family Dilemma: A Better Balance (New Feminist Solutions 3; BCRW, 2007). Roundtable, February 1-2, 2007.
  Kate Bedford and Janet R. Jakobsen, Toward a Vision of Sexual and Economic Justice (New Feminist Solutions 4; BCRW, 2009). Gildersleeve Lecture and Colloquium, November 29, 2007. 
  Premilla Nadesen and Tiffany Williams, Valuing Domestic Work (New Feminist Solutions 5; BCRW, 2011). Three-year collaboration with Domestic Workers United and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. First NDWA Congress held at Barnard College in 2008. First East Coast Regional Congress of the NDWA at Barnard in 2009.
  See also Gisela Fosado and Janet R. Jakobsen, eds., Valuing Domestic Work, an issue of S&F Online 8.1 (Fall 2009)
  Amber Hollibaugh, Janet Jakobsen, and Catherine Sameh, Desiring Change (New Feminist Solutions 7; BCRW and Queers for Economic Justice, 2011). Desiring Change Convenings 2005-2007.
  See also Joseph N. DeFilippis, Lisa Duggan, Kenyon Farros, and Richard Kim, eds., A New Queer Agenda, an issue of S&F Online 10.1-10.2 (Fall 2011/Spring 2012).  
  
  Especially noteworthy among these publications were the collaborations with Domestic Workers United and the National Domestic Workers Alliance in 2008 and 2009, and the collaboration with Queers for Economic Justice in 2005-2007. Both multiyear projects stand as model instances of deep collaboration between scholarship and activism, and both demonstrate the fruitfulness of focused intersectional work that puts the experiences of precariously positioned workers and economic subjects at the center of critical analysis in the service of economic justice. (See more on both of these collaborations in the section on the ethics and politics of care.)