Erika Denisse Grajeda is the Marilyn J. Gittell Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2016, she completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin, where she focused on intimate labor markets (e.g., domestic, care, and sex work), and the politics and mobilizations they animate. Specifically, her research interrogates how altruistic interventions enacted by state and non-state actors into gendered forms of exploitation and abuse shape migrant women’s livelihood strategies, subjectivities, and political sensibilities. Currently she is working on a book manuscript provisionally titled, Body and Soul: Domestic Worker Organizing and the Contradictory Politics of Care, where she argues that while much attention has been dedicated to punitive and criminalizing practices targeting im/migrants, scholars overlook “soft” modalities of social control aimed at capacitating them for the exigencies of responsible citizenship and racial capitalism. Located at the juncture of sociology, critical migration studies, and gender studies, her research on organizing intimate labor seeks to engage communities, activists, and scholars focused on issues related to social justice, community participation, and social movements.

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