By exploring the experiences of women cashew processing workers in Kerala, India, this study examines the interlinkages between paid cashew processing work and unpaid domestic work. Drawing on feminist qualitative research, it analyses how these two forms of work are intertwined through women’s everyday lives and embodied experiences. Situating the study within broader feminist scholarship on gendered labour in Kerala, it argues that women experience paid and unpaid work as a continuum, interlinked through women’s embodied labour. This continuum is shaped by caste, class and the nature of employment, temporary or permanent, government or private. The study further reflects on how survival becomes the core component of both forms of work and how women’s meanings, values and emotions challenge the binary between productive and reproductive labour. By placing women’s voices and embodied experiences at the centre of analysis, this study contributes to intersectional feminist understandings of work and labour embodiment within Kerala’s gendered labour scholarship.
The article centers on an interview with Lupe, an undocumented teacher who also identifies as queer and Latinx. Through Lupe's story, we come to see how undocumented teachers experience a form of hyper-precarity shaped by the interlocking forces of racist, neoliberal immigration and education systems. Selected excerpts from my conversation with Lupe illustrate how hyper-precarity due to changing political climates, curricular backlash, and immigration policy can all lead to unstable employment and concerns over mental health and wellbeing. In spite of these considerable challenges, Lupe’s story also reflects the critical contributions undocumented teachers are making in their classrooms and communities.
Eric Blanc calls on unions to take an aggressive approach to organizing and to challenge what he calls the "post-Reagan consensus". Along these lines, he believes, that worker to worker organizing, which can now reach scale though technological advancements, holds the key for rebuilding labor and reversing the downward economic trajectory that has manifested some of the most glaring inequality in a century.
Politicized discourse around what is appropriate in schools informs norms for professional behavior for preservice teachers, and professionalism expectations in teacher preparation have been proven to be exclusionary for preservice teachers from systemically marginalized groups. Therefore, it is important we understand how professionalism expectations inform how diverse preservice teachers see themselves as political actors in the field. As part of a larger critical comparative case study, this study explores how preservice elementary teachers describe their understandings and connections between professionalism and the political nature of the teaching field. Humanizing pedagogy in teacher education served as the theoretical framework, and the data included focus group interviews, participant-generated artwork, teacher preparation program policy documents, and open-ended surveys with participants. Data were analyzed Mullet’s (2018) approach to critical discourse analysis in education research. Three findings were identified: 1) professionalism is respectful and politics are not; 2) teachers do not decide what is political; and 3) diverse preservice elementary teachers believe they must be apolitical. The study is significant because it reveals how the divisive political climate is informing diverse preservice elementary teachers’ development, which has implications for the fields of teacher preparation and teacher education policy.
This intersectional qualitative study seeks to unpack how public school teachers in South Florida make sense of efforts to silence Florida educators and prohibit teaching “that individuals share responsibility for others' past actions by virtue of their race, sex or national origin.” Drawing on Black feminist theories, (also identified as problematic by Florida policy makers,) this study examines not just diverse identities, but also how public schooling is implicated in perpetuating multiple and interconnected systems of oppression (e.g., racism, classism, ableism, patriarchy). Unlike the remainder of the country where the teaching profession is overwhelmingly white, teachers in South Florida are predominantly culturally and ethnically diverse (e.g., 56.7 self-identify as Hispanic (56.7%), and 24.9% as Black non-Hispanic, 24.9%). In this study, education researchers collaborated with the union president of the fourth largest school district in the United States to ask teachers about their interpretations of “anti-Woke” legislations. Moreover, the teachers were asked to explain how they and other educators are enacting, resisting, and/or subverting the intentions of these legislations.
