CITIES COLLABORATIVE: PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS: 2020 IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE SERIES: NATALIA MOLINA (USC), MARCIA CHATELAIN (GEORGETOWN), GABRIEL WINANT (CHICAGO): “Essential Work: Race, Class, and Precarity”

REGISTRATION NECESSARY: REGISTER HERE

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the dangers of precarious public-facing employment. In this roundtable, three major scholars consider place “essential work”–in the service sector, food preparation, and health care–in broad historical perspective, with attention to Latinx, African American, and women workers who have borne the brunt of high risk, poorly paid, insecure work.

Natalia Molina is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. A 2020 Macarthur Fellow, she is the author of Fit To Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 and How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. She has also served as her university’s Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Diversity and Equity.

Marcia Chatelain is a Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University. She is author of South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration and the widely reviewed book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. In 2014 she organized her fellow scholars in a social-media response to the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri, entitled #FergusonSyllabus. #FergusonSyllabus has led to similar online initiatives and has shaped curricular projects in K–12 and university settings around the United States.

Gabriel Winant is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. His writing about work, inequality, and capitalism in modern America has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Dissent, and n+1.