Global Relationships and Dependencies

The GW example enables me to point to a university community that depends upon gendered service labor of women of color. I have argued that gendered labor is thinly visible locally. In the daily lives of faculty, students, and administrators who work on campus, gendered reproductive labor is not part of the discourse of belonging to community. Nor is there in dominant discourse any sustained recognition of the dependencies between intellectual and reproductive labor or analysis of the historical formations of formal and informal labor in relation to gender and race. In addition to sustaining local community, gendered labor sustains GW’s global identification and reach.

In addition to being a local place where students learn, janitors clean, immigrant laborers install windows, staff manage offices, and faculty teach, GW has a global identification and reach. Because of its centrality to the global economy and global governance, Washington, DC has a relatively economically stable global location. In this context, it is a hub for a gendered and racialized economy, income-generating activities that are low-paid, often occur outside of state regulation, and are not included in official economic calculations or discourse (Sassen). In the current global economy, cities that are central to the operations of formal economy rely upon women of color and immigrant women (these categories obviously overlap), to supply low-wage labor that is associated with women’s domestic roles. As Saskia Sassen argues, informal, service sector work has a particular gendered structure; it is “buil[t] on the backs of women” (179). Immigrant women and women from longstanding minority communities do the labor that is essential for the operation of the global economy and local places in the global economy (180). However, while migrant women supply labor that makes intellectual labor possible, they are not seen as members of university communities. The vocabularies of contemporary globalization do not include low-paid service sector gendered labor.

The university is part of global exchanges that bring students, faculty, and other intellectual workers to Washington, DC from all over the world and that send students and faculty abroad. Research done at GW on economies and social groups is used to make funding decisions by powerful agencies and institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations as well as nongovernmental organizations. Scientific knowledge shapes policy and resource decisions by the US government. Global exchanges of knowledge in a range of fields are directed through university centers and institutes across disciplines and fields. We can call GW a “global university”; a “command point” and center of the global knowledge economy; a key location for production, innovation, and dissemination of ideas, policies, data, and knowledge (Massey, “Geographies,” 12-13).

In fact, GW’s identification and influence as a global university could not exist without local labor such as food service and trash disposal. As a local place with a global identification, GW depends upon upkeep of campuses and buildings, garbage removal, and clean bathrooms. This reproductive labor and these reproductive laborers make their global identifications and influence possible: faculty, students, and administrators could not travel, study, or cross borders without reproductive labor. To rephrase my earlier point, thick global economic dependencies that sustain the global reach and influence of the university are (unequally) constituted through understudied local intersections between labor, gender, race, citizenship. In this context, race, gender, citizenship, and other systems of oppression are central to understanding how global universities are at the center of the global knowledge economy.⁴

Shifting Local Affiliations

How can we draw attention to thick, local relations and interdependencies that make the city and the university’s global reach and influence possible? In the context of thick gendered and racialized labor relations, how do we create literate practices, reading and writing practices that are used to interpret and evaluate knowledge (Schell and Rawson), that bring to the surface macropolitical relations and dependencies? How can we create obligation, or what Iris Marion Young calls political responsibility, among both local communities and global places? How do we analyze race, class, gender, ability, citizenship, the local relations upon which the university depends as well as the global relations that sustain universities and cities? How do we shift identification from hegemonic representation of universities to thick, differentiated affinities that link people within a particular place?

It is relatively easy to find examples that mark the absence of women’s reproductive labor in local discourse and global discourse: in academic discussions; in administrative communications; in less formal conversations about who matters, whose work is valued, and who is invited to participate in decisions. Universities are often sites in which the economic and political interests of a dominant class are consolidated through practices that shape identities, behaviors, and feelings. Yet universities also include spaces and activities that exceed this hegemonic function (Democracies to Come). To expand inclusion and access to understudied intersections between labor, gender, race, and citizenship, it is important to look for discourse and activities where recognition of gendered reproductive labor is active and present (Kabeer, Sudarshan, and Milward). While there are multiple examples of invisibility, there are also examples of cross-cohort recognition and solidarity. Universities put different kinds of workers in contact with each other in locations where relationships develop between people who come into contact with each other through everyday interactions (more on these informal interactions in the next paragraph). Academic institutions, as Chandra Mohanty points out, are “contradictory place[s] where knowledges are colonized but also contested” (Feminism 170).

For at least the past fifteen years, a small cohort of workers, students, and faculty at GW have been involved with organizing that builds solidarity across employment categories. This work is informed by relationships built through daily interactions on campus. Food workers and students talk to each other in food courts, and these interactions open up into discussions about daily conditions of work. Faculty and facilities workers interact in office spaces. Over the years, these informal interactions have created conversation and friendship that extend beyond employment categories to solidarity and support.

As one example, in 2010 students in an organization at GW called the Progressive Student Union (PSU) became friendly through informal interactions with food workers. Conversations about working conditions with the workers inspired students and workers to organize breakfasts for janitors, cafeteria workers, faculty, students, and maintenance workers. Many of the GW workers are employed by Sodexo, a company contracted by GW to provide all on-campus food. The backdrop of the breakfasts are working conditions in the student union, the Marvin Center. Some workers are unionized, some are not, and there is a long history of workers being laid off by Sodexo as the company and GW restructure dining services. In the context of poor labor practices, there has also been a long-standing alliance and on-going communication between the PSU and service workers that has been used to activate support for workers.⁵ In 2010, the breakfasts were the current form of that alliance. They took place once a week in the student union and were organized as a potluck. According to Paul Seltzer, the idea behind the breakfasts is “to build solidarity through talking.” Although these potlucks were not sustained over a long period of time, they are example of students and workers transforming segregated labor categories of student and worker that permeate dominant university culture. Because these relationships are in place, students, faculty, and workers create solidarity around labor disputes. PSU students and faculty have supported a successful unionizing effort by food service workers on GW’s Mt. Vernon campus. This effort involved showing up to public rallies and providing other forms of public, symbolic support for food workers. All of these actions were built through informal, everyday conversations with each other in dining halls where food workers, students, faculty, and staff chat about life and work. In the everyday life of the university, a range of people who work, live, and break bread with each other are part of public life and public culture. As I will go on to argue, these informal, convivial encounters can create alliances of workers, students, faculty, and staff.

The PSU breakfasts are an example of local affiliation and identification, recognition that talking and organizing across discursive, institutional, social, and labor borders is important for solidarity building and worker protection. The breakfasts sustain communication so that workers and students can respond quickly to management tactics. Yet political purchase in the potlucks extends beyond smart union tactics that sustained relationships in order to provide a quick response to immediate labor crises. The potlucks are a discursive and structural space that is not adjudicated by the university. The potlucks are not sponsored by student life employees nor are they officially sanctioned “meetings” either by the union or with management. The potlucks are outside the official structures outside lines of authority, and outside GW’s identification as a global institution. They are also inside the local space of the university (literally, the Marvin Center), and they bring together people whose (different) work and lives are interdependent.

In other words, the institution is the official structure and discourse of the GW community; yet, there are relations and interdependencies that are both within GW and outside official university structure, culture, and discourse. These are interdependencies, identifications, and personal connections that exceed official institutional sanction and recognition. The potlucks imagined community as grounded in recognition of multiple forms of labor and recognition of differently situated subjects who work in universities. The breakfasts are an example of an event and relationship that exceed official structures and official discourses and community that is imagined through its global reach and influence. It is a local strategy that emerges from experiences and realities of a particular group of workers and that responds to the particular discursive and cultural context in which they are located.⁶ It involves both concern with working conditions and a concurrent concern with issues of gender-specific constraints that shape working conditions. In other words, as we look to shift and expand the keywords access and inclusion, as we work to address entanglements between labor, gender, race, and citizenship in the current global moment, and as we act to shift discourse where reproductive labor is absent, we can build from informal, convivial encounters that can create alliances of workers, students, faculty, and staff.

Many of the students who organized the breakfasts study in departments and take classes whose curriculum emphasize what Mohanty calls “counterhegemonic pedagogies” (204), classroom practices, interactions, relationships, discourse and research that seek to shift common sense ideologies of gender, race, and difference through analysis of lived experience and local structures in relation to historical analysis and analysis of larger relations of capitalist political economy (204). PSU students are familiar with interdisciplinary scholarship that argues for responsibility from membership of local and national community for globalized labor. Iris Marion Young argues for responsibility from membership in local and national community to responsibility for globalized labor. In Young’s argument, labor connects people to each other even though these connections might not be visible. She argues for political responsibility that would be derived from acknowledgement of how different forms of labor sustain life across local and global places. Her notion of political responsibility makes thick local and global relations visible: “political responsibilities derive . . . not from the contingent fact of membership in common political institutions . . . . [They] derive from the social and economic structures in which they act and mutually affect one another” (Young, “Responsibility” 376). Young’s work suggests that community can be imagined and constituted by a collective narrative that recognizes intellectual and manual labor that sustain each other.⁷ In other words, within GW, there are experiences, pedagogies, curriculum, and relationships that are not shaped by dominant university narrative. Students and workers have drawn upon multiple forms of knowledge to shape relationships that emerge from social and economic structures. Their activities and their knowledge demonstrate “the possibility of counterhegemonic discourse and oppositional analytic spaces within the institution” (Mohanty 198).

As I have discussed, universities are complex, differentiated relations and interdependencies among local and global (gendered, racialized) workers. In this framework, the PSU and service workers, many of whom are women, suggest space for critical conversation and convivial collaboration across employment categories, citizenship, class, and gender and racial identifications. The potlucks are an opportunity to call into question labor structures and discursive practices that are fraught with labor, race, gender, and citizenship. They can provide “bottom up” literacies for recognizing those who are overlooked, invisible, or simply forgotten in the constitution of community, in this case because reproductive labor is invisible in an academic community (Kabeer, Sudarshan, and Milward 45). Building from on-the-ground examples from student, faculty, and worker collaboration, the keywords access and inclusion can be recast by looking at spaces where knowledges are contested. Instead of “where are the women,” we might ask “who is working?,” “what work are women doing?,” “what are the conditions of their work?,” and “what is the relationship between the labor that women are doing and social categories that shape their experience?” These questions have been used locally to build solidarity and support. At the very least, past and current alliances of students and workers demonstrate that the thin use of inclusion and access in scholarly settings and in dominant discourse that I have described and the invisibility of reproductive laborers is not inevitable. Thin discourse and gendered and racialized employment structures can be addressed, identifications with different places and people within the local and across the global can be created, vocabularies can be expanded, and identifications and structures can be intervened in. The move now is to explore understudied global intersections between labor, gender, race, and citizenship and to build solidarities that address globalized inequalities, expanding our inquiry to “how does this labor support university’s global influence and identification?”