Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.
What is unique about your research on this topic?
My dissertation explores the coalescence and divergence of labor and Black liberation movements in 21st century St. Louis, Missouri, with a focus on the role of fast-food workers from the Fight for $15 (FF$15) movement in the 2014 Ferguson uprising, which emerged in response to the police killing of Black teenager Michael Brown. Following fast-food workers into Ferguson, I investigate the development and transformation of the two intertwined movements—Black liberation and labor—and their leaders, participants, ideologies, goals, and tactics. To do so, my research builds from and intervenes into a lesser-known subfield of psychology known as community psychology. As opposed to a traditional psychological lens that places individuals in a vacuum and top-down socio-historical approaches that prioritize macrolevel developments, community psychologists foreground individual and collective agency within micro- and macro-systems or ecological levels. My project takes a novel approach to ecological analysis, the study of these multi-level processes and relations, in order to recontextualize the development of FF$15 and the Ferguson uprising within local political economic conditions and the global transition to low-wage service sector labor, without sacrificing the “macro” or the “micro.” Additionally, I seek to extend revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s theories on anti-colonial struggle, neo-colonialism, and social movement transformation into the current moment, reintroducing Fanon as a central thinker who belongs in the community psychology canon.
What drives your interest in this research?
In her 1973 book Philosophy and Revolution, Marxist humanist Raya Dunayevskaya wrote that “our hunger for theory arises from the totality of the present global crisis.” I came to this project desperate to understand what I saw as immense potential for social movement coalescence in an era when neoliberalization—and the concomitant transformation of the working class into an underemployed, low-wage sub-working class—had seemingly crushed working class movements. The Ferguson uprising was a transformative moment for my consciousness development as an undergraduate student, and my participation in the Fight for $15 movement as a student activist exposed me to the undertheorized relationships between Black liberation and labor movements that were unfolding locally. The theories and methods I have identified to address my research questions do not solely exist in the realm of knowledge production, but rather, are meant to interpret the world in order to change it. Thus, as much as this project is a scholarly pursuit, it is equally an endeavor in praxis.
How has the fellowship seminar shaped the way you’re approaching your research?
Attempting to “think again” on an (inter)disciplinary scale felt like an enormous and lonely undertaking before I started the HRI fellowship seminar. I am one of few community psychologists at the U of I, and I have struggled to identify where my research fits disciplinarily, as my research approaches are influenced not only by community psychology but also by history, sociology, African American studies, labor studies, and more. The seminar offered a much-needed space for bouncing ideas, sharing reading recommendations, and offering generative and generous feedback. Getting a chance to read and respond to the brave, boundary-pushing work of my colleagues and hearing their thought-provoking, constructive feedback on my own writing has increased my confidence in writing boldly about my interventions into my field and beyond. HRI has provided me with an interdisciplinary home for my research and a wonderful community of scholars who remind me that I am not alone!