Kritika Pandey

Other Employment

• Teaching Assistant, University of Southern California, 2020 – 2023

Summary Statement of Research Interests

While global discourse on domestic worker rights argues for legal recognition, and despite global standards for paid domestic work established by the International Labor Organization convention in 2011, domestic workers continue to grapple with the State to ensure legal protection. Additionally, workers continue to struggle with everyday dehumanization, forcing them to navigate fraught intimacies with their employers. How then, does a worker rights movement emerge and sustain itself amid this precarity? Combining transnational feminist ethnography, interviews and archival data, my dissertation research investigates collective action for worker rights across two different national contexts (India and the US). I analyze how women’s worker movements in precarious sectors negotiate between global conversations on standardization of labor rights and everyday issues of inequality in their work conditions. Through this project, I hope to contribute to scholarship on economic sociology, labor movements and transnational sociology by addressing gaps between local and global discourses on worker rights and discussing tensions around professionalization and legal recognition in sectors like paid domestic work.

Research Keywords

Economic Sociology, Transnational Feminism and Ethnography, Globalization, Gender and Migrant Labor, Women’s Movements, Social Theory, Qualitative Methods

• American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant , 2024-2025
• Gold Family Summer Fellowship, Spring 2024
• USC Gender and Sexuality Studies Department Tedesco Fellowship, 2021-2022