Faculty Fellow Lecture Series: Jaira J. Harrington, Black Studies

The Institute for the Humanities presents the Faculty Fellow Lecture series with Jaira J. Harrington, Black Studies: “Between Dreams, Myths and Reality: Domestic Work, Unions, and Anti-Blackness in São Paulo,” on Wednesday, Oct. 9, at 4 p.m.

In this lecture, Harrington explores the barriers to the recognition of domestic workers’ unions as a legitimate labor movement in São Paulo, Brazil. Domestic work is a labor market that is overwhelmingly composed of Black women. Caught between the intersections of racial capitalism and sexism, domestic workers and their unions have been rendered invisible. From her interviews with São Paulo’s municipal Domestic Workers’ Union, she finds that union members, participants and leaders shape their own liberatory analytical framework around their marginalization. Their framing pushes back against Eurocentric, Marxist ideas of labor that center the mythical male, hardworking European, industrial and immigrant laborer.

Harrington is an assistant professor of Black Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on the political activism of Latin American Black communities, diasporic Black feminism, and race, class and labor organizing among Brazilian domestic workers. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, Fulbright and American Academy of University Women. She is completing her first book, “Inscribed and Erased: Domestic Workers’ Rights in Brazil” with the UIC Institute for the Humanities.

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