This study identifies, analyzes, and contextualizes the ways Black women perceive and perform motherwork in Los Angeles. I specifically explore the following questions: (1) How are Black women’s work trajectories impacted by their mothering experiences in Los Angeles? (2) What impact does education, their own and their children’s, have on Black mothers’ work trajectories? I focus on how Black women negotiate their work relationships after becoming mothers, illuminating their matriculation into performing motherwork. I understand motherwork as the racially gendered labor women who mother enact as parents and as workers in the economy. I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Black women who have experiences mothering and working in Los Angeles. Rather than demonizing or glorifying the mothers in this study, I describe and interpret their viewpoints, providing a platform for them to conceptualize and voice their social roles and realities. In analyzing the ways Black women merge family and work responsibilities, I conceptualize and define the term modes of motherworking which describes the multidirectional ways Black mothers navigate between, within, and at the intersections of family labor, employed labor, and educational labor. This study also identifies three distinct modes of motherworking: adaptive motherwork, incorporative motherwork, and transitionary motherwork. When discussing Black motherwork, this study takes into consideration Black women’s histories with economic and education-based discrimination, reproductive injustices, and anti-Black gendered ideologies of families to better understand Black mothers’ decisions navigating social institutions. This study particularly highlights the importance of education as a critical space of Black women’s labor and thus an important component of Black motherwork.

This dissertation examines how Black residents in Milwaukee, Wisconsin experience and manage their relationships with law enforcement. My analysis is based on eight focus group interviews with thirty Black Milwaukee residents ages 18-70. Research questions were: How do Black Milwaukee residents experience policing by the Milwaukee Police Department? What possibilities exist to repair the fractured relationship between the Milwaukee Police Department and the city’s Black communities? Findings focus on gender specific experiences of policing in the city, citizen complaints about the Milwaukee Police Department, and participant driven ideas to reinstate police legitimacy in Black communities. These findings uncover the complex relationship that over-policed, but under-protected communities have with law enforcement as participants reveal that they desire the police services, but demand to be treated with dignity, fairness, and respect.

South Asian diaspora populations occupy a complicated position inside U.S. racial politics and within Asian American studies. On the one hand, their racialization in the U.S. subjects them to racist hate and discrimination that might motivate participation in social movements (Modi 2018; Prashad 2014). On the other hand, South Asian American communities include some of the richest populations in the country (SAALT 2019), a demographic that is much less likely to participate in social movements, especially left-leaning ones. In addition, precarious immigration categories or citizenship statuses in the United States may also discourage them from political action. Based on interviews and web surveys with 26 South Asian Americans, Joseph argues that South Asian Americans interested in social movements combat two controlling images: one of the politically apathetic South Asian American, and the other of the perfect standard activist. South Asian Americans attracted to activism circumvent these controlling images by forming a self-definition based both on their racial identifications and on their own definitions of activism. They also find community among people they perceive as fellow “weirdos.” This study contributes to the Asian American literature through its examinations of ally-ship, affiliation and accompaniment among aggrieved communities of color, demonstrating how the very category of activist is interpreted, enacted, and resisted differently because of the complexities of the structural positions that South Asians occupy in the United States.

The term Black mother is haunted by a history of racialized colonialism, in which enslaved women were denied maternal privileges, having their children ripped from their arms and stripped from their protection. The afterlife of slavery and the cultural myths of pathological Black families created in its wake have deliberately portrayed Black women as domineering matriarchs and excessively procreating welfare mothers (Collins 2000). Blaming Black mothers and attributing the problems of the Black community to deviant parenting diverts attention away from the racist institutions and practices at the heart of racial capitalism. It allows those in power to evade their responsibility to redress pervasive discrimination in employment, education, housing, and health care.

Theories on mothering tend to lack intersectional frameworks and analysis which perpetuates white hegemonic ideals based on the normative heteropatriarchal nuclear family unit (Chodorow 1989; Hays 1996). They tend to embrace a universal model for conceptualizing motherhood that generalizes from the experiences of white, middle class families and assumes a sharp dichotomy between public and private spheres (Chodorow 1978). These family ideals remain entangled with longstanding historical notions of true womanhood that vilify mothers that do not conform to nuclear familial roles. Ignoring structural conditions, some research even blames Black mothers for the patterns of single women-headed households in urban Black families. Despite their incessant battles with institutional injustices, Black women’s profound determination to uphold their roles as mothers has proved invaluable to the survival of Black families. While intersectional theories grounded in Black feminism have contested pathological imaginaries of Black women (hooks 1981; Crenshaw 1991; Omolade 1994; Collins 2000), and empirical work on Black families has reframed and contextualized Black motherhood (Joseph and Lewis 1981; Moore 2011; Barnes 2015), there still remains a need for research that provides a space for dialogue between emerging sociohistorical concepts and the people whose lives they implicate.

This study focuses on the ways Black mothers perform motherwork, mainly through navigating their children’s engagements with educational institutions in Los Angeles. I deploy the term motherwork which was conceived by Patricia Hill Collins to discuss the ways Black mothers have historically navigated the challenges of parenting in a racist and sexist society. In an attempt to create a dialectical space for Black feminist frameworks and Black women’s experiences, I utilize in-depth, semi-structured interviews as a way of acknowledging participants as agents of knowledge production.

I identify and analyze three distinct performances of motherwork: transformative, adaptive, and integrative. My participants convey how their enactment of motherwork includes serving as both educators and advocates for their children. Essentially, they conceptualize motherwork as an educational tool that reaches far beyond the boundaries of a classroom.

At the onset of the twenty-first century, the US security state exemplifies the kind of militarized social control that has become a key buttress to a global regime of deepening inequalities, injustices and indignities. This study explores how three social movement groups, broadly from the Christian left, majority white and middle-class, resist the US security state by envisioning and enacting solidarity with the state’s targets. Original data collection includes weeks of participant observation, forty-nine semi-structured interviews, fifty-four follow-up surveys, and an archive of hundreds of courtroom statements with three protest communities: 1) School of the Americas Watch, which seeks to close the military training facility at Ft. Benning, Georgia; 2) the Migrant Trail Walk, part of the US/Mexico border justice movement; and 3) Witness Against Torture, a grassroots effort to close the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center. I identify a political practice among these groups that I term solidarity witness by which these activists come to see, feel, and know injustices that do not most immediately impact them personally and then testify widely to the complex impacts of state violence. Solidarity witness is both performative and prefigurative. Through ritual protest and embodied, sometimes high-risk tactics, these activists expand the sphere of politics while nurturing internal cultures of opposition. Their mode of resistance reveals the importance of affect, embodiment and morality in social movement mobilization.

While the groups in this study do intend to change state policies and institutions, their chances for melioristic reform have appeared to be small in practice. Their acts of ethical witness in the public sphere and principled refusal in close community instead highlight the limitations of policy change under a global, neoliberal security complex. In the face of impervious US political institutions and only the smallest pretense to real democracy, the practice of solidarity witness allows these activists to reckon with legacies of privilege tied to the oppression of others while also seeking to disinvest in this privilege in meaningful ways. Theirs is ultimately a conception of solidarity in which state violence and injustice impacts everyone, but in ways that must not be made equivalent. Solidarity witness allows these activists to satisfy a desire for self-respect, to craft a current existence that seems more dignified, moral, just and imaginative than their lives previously permitted, and to attach themselves to a collective struggle for a better future.

This study examines the everyday struggles of Los Angeles restaurant workers as they experience, perceive and contest exploitative work conditions. The restaurant industry employs an estimated eleven million workers in the United States, making it one of the largest private employers in the nation. The restaurant industry is thriving; yet, one has to ask, thriving for whom? In spite of their employment in the largest complex of restaurants in the nation, in a growing industry with soaring profits, Los Angeles workers have not reaped rewards commensurate with their labor. As a concentrated site of low-wage employment, restaurant workplace conditions serve as a generative site for researching the impact of neoliberal policies of flexible accumulation regimes in the production of a vulnerable racialized workforce. This project applies James C. Scott’s concept of the moral economy to understand the expectations and notions of justice that workers articulate in response to exploitative conditions. Scholarly research has generally defined exploitation of low-wage workers as the surplus taken from workers’ wages. Securing surplus value by exploiting labor power is indeed a central part of the process that enables exploitation to occur, yet it tells us little about the subjective feelings of the exploited. Through the use of interviews with nine restaurant workers of color, participant observation, and archival research, this study will explore how restaurant workers define exploitation, navigate tensions, and create solidarities in their everyday lives.

El Barrio Lindo: Chicana/o and Latinx Social Space in Postindustrial Los Angeles explores how youths and young adults cognitively map and physically traverse space in the postindustrial city. In the neoliberal era, when dominant social groups promote a world that revolves around materialistic gain and hyper-individualism, I reveal how artist activists author and authorize multiple and diverse visions of social membership. El Barrio Lindo focuses on how Chicanas/os and Latinxs re-appropriate social space through painting, music performances, poetry readings, marches and other forms of collective activity, carried out in the backyards of houses, in alleyways, in freeway culverts, in the areas that surround taco trucks, in common areas in public housing projects, and along busy boulevards across the city. I document and analyze repertoires of expressive culture that include “alternative archives” about race, gender, class, and power. These archives provide a critical reading of methods used by Chicana/o and Latinx communities for waging material and symbolic struggles for visibility and mobility. My sources include oral history interviews, community newspaper stories, archival documents, poems, song recordings, visual art, and observant participation.

This study of environmental racism and health in Kern County explores the experiences of farmworkers and formerly incarcerated men and women who have suffered from Valley Fever, an illness caused by a fungus spore that can lead to long-term pulmonary, brain, and spinal infections, and in some cases, death. Building on previous studies, I expand the analysis of how vulnerable groups acquire and recover from Valley Fever. Previous research has focused on racial minorities’ genetic propensity for disparate impacts (Hector, Rutherford, Tsang 2011; Galgiani 2014), the efficacy of medical interventions (CDCP 2016), and efforts to map the areas where the disease is most likely found (Smith et. Al 1961, Kolivaras et. Al 2000). These piecemeal approaches inevitably foreground one cause or cure over others. They also divert analysis away from the conditions in which the disease is contracted and away from the structures that govern accessing care. My research explores the cumulative vulnerabilities that shape how vulnerable group’s contract and recover from Valley Fever. I ask: How do vulnerable groups come to understand Valley Fever’s causes, consequences, and potential cures? How does their knowledge differ from conventional experts in public health and biomedical research? What social and ecological structures in Kern County shape their ability to manage valley fever? Over the course of ten consecutive months of field research, I drew upon a broad range of methods, taking note of the prevailing social and environmental conditions of a Valley Fever endemic county. I interviewed thirty-nine farm workers and formerly incarcerated men and women of color, but also community activists who work closely with these two groups. I also conducted extensive research in state and county archives, court reports and amicus briefs, online social media and secondary sources to explore how vulnerable groups contract and recover from this disease, the strategies they devise to deal with its effects, and to compare their knowledge from conventional experts. My strategies reflect João H. Costa Vargas (2008) discussion on observant participation where participating, rather than passively observing, was critical to entering the field site and collecting data. I utilize the social ecological framework of illness and the lessons of the environmental justice movement to uncover how the health and wellbeing of farmworkers and prisoners in Kern County are damaged long before they come into contact with Valley Fever spores.

In state legislatures across the United States, a coalition of progressive, moderate, and conservative lawmakers have come together in the last twenty years around a common goal: funding highly effective contraception for low-income state residents. The political tensions and media debates about contraception suggest it could be a difficult area for bipartisan collaboration. In fact, it represents an area of rare interest convergence for some members of the two major political parties and, more broadly, for a wide range of stakeholders. This study analyzes how this process unfolded in two states, Texas and California. Drawing from fifty-five interviews with actors across the ecology of reproductive policy advocacy in Texas and California, alongside qualitative content analysis of documents published online by the organizations that employ them, I ask how reproductive policy advocates in these states discursively construct long-term, highly effective contraception for low-income residents as a worthwhile state investment. Placing these efforts in the broader historical context of racialized and class-based reproductive control in the United States, I argue that framing low-income people’s pregnancies as expensive to the state, and long-term contraception as a solution, has been central to this process. I find that some stakeholders have drawn on the rhetorical construction of low-income people as simultaneously capable of reducing state spending by not becoming pregnant and too unreliable to take a daily oral contraceptive. I theorize these interrelated processes as reproductive responsibilization. I argue, moreover, that advocates should move toward a more sustainable advocacy in pursuit of the deeply important goals of expanding reproductive justice and access to reproductive healthcare.

Reality television has faced intense criticism for its negative depictions of African American women and their husbands engaging in personal and group disputes. “Reality shows often cast relatively diverse groups with the intention of seeing whether conflict or harmony will result” (Montemurro 2007:84). The tension between conflict and harmony provides dramatic tension that builds audience investment and engagement. It is a commonplace of reality television to portray families riddled with gendered and generational tensions and antagonisms. When the main characters in the show are Black, however, conflict and harmony take on an added resonance.

The history that has given African Americans a linked fate makes harmony a survival strategy while rendering conflict as a threat to that survival. Moreover, the long history of imputing pathological dysfunction in Black families as the cause of Black suffering, a move that absolves white racism of responsibility, makes representations of Black family fights damaging to all Blacks in a way that does not apply to similar representations of white families.

Presentations of dysfunction in Black families and social circles can be used to indict all Black people through the dynamic that sociologist Albert Memmi calls “the mark of the plural,” the process through which any failing by any member of a socially subordinated group is taken as evidence of the unfitness of the group as a whole (Memmi 2013:129). Yet Black families and social circles are not immune to the dysfunctions that appear in all social groups. The cumulative vulnerabilities created by generations of exploitation, oppression and cultural demonization impose intense pressures of Black sociality and solidarity.

In this thesis, I argue that the same reality television portrayals that may well reinforce impressions of Black social pathology also provide Black viewers with a forum for understanding, arbitrating and negotiating the mark of collective dysfunction.