Assistant Professor of Sociology
Fayetteville State University
An Affiliate Institution of the University of North Carolina System
My research combines insights from industrial relations, cultural studies, and social theory to analyze struggles over work and labor. My forthcoming book, Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South, draws on a decade of fieldwork to explain the challenges of new union organizing in the automotive industry. Broadly, my work centers on questions of labor power and organization amid economic restructuring, climate crisis, and geopolitical turmoil. I am currently a Research Fellow at ChainGE Lab (Labor Law for a Global Value Chain Economy), a project of the European Research Council, where I explore how workers are asserting their collective power across scales and strategically exploiting structural vulnerabilities within global production networks.
Insurgency, Contention and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South
How the United Auto Workers achieved a landmark victory at Volkswagen's Chattanooga Assembly Plant
View at Temple University Press →This article shows how marginal actors can successfully dismantle the deep-seated structural inertia of bureaucratic organizations to achieve transformative change.
This paper critiques the enduring dominance of transformational leadership paradigms and conceptualizes leaders and contexts as co-constitutive, moving beyond the limitations of both heroic individualism and contextual determinism.
View Full TextChallenging the prevailing view that the Chums of Chance's aerial departure in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day represents a transcendent utopian triumph, this paper argues that their escape merely perpetuates the systems they sought to dismantle.
View Full TextThis study draws on Jacques Rancière’s reading of the worker-poet Louis-Gabriel Gauny to propose a "neither/and" framework that preserves the fundamental undecidability of time, identity, and flexibility, demanding a critical reevaluation of managerial concepts such as work-life balance.
View Full TextTracing the United Auto Workers’ decade-long organizing drive at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant across three elections, this essay explains how the union overcame its 2014 and 2019 defeats to secure a decisive 2024 victory, briefly reversing decades of declining density in the motor vehicle manufacturing sector.
View Full TextChronicling rise and fall of a union democracy movement, this piece illustrates the challenges involved in sustaining rank-and-file independence following electoral success.
View Full TextThis paper deploys topological geographic thought to critique the limitations of Global Production Network theory during the US auto industry’s transition to electric vehicles.
View Full TextThis essay contributes to contemporary debates over the nature of surveillance under late-stage capitalism through a close reading of La Loi du Marché (2016) and En Guerre (2019).
View Full TextThis paper argues that declining union density in the US private sector results in part from strategic failures internal to the labor movement, challenging the view that external factors alone determine organizing outcomes.
View Full TextThis work provides previously untranslated portions of Gabriel Tarde’s The Public and the Crowd, revealing Tarde’s political ambivalence toward modernity and his complex engagement with the concept of the crowd.
View Full TextChallenging traditional Marxist metrics of individual exploitation that fail to account for the realities of cybertime, this paper draws on Bifo’s concept of molecular subjectivation to investigate what political strategies remain available as immaterial labor becomes the dominant mode of production.
View Full TextDrawing on labor process theory and Derrida’s notion of the gift, this paper argues that side project policy functions as a mechanism for intensifying managerial control and exploitation, creating a paradoxical space that simultaneously reinforces power and offers possibilities for resistance.
View Full TextCo-authored with Sharon Zukin, Valerie Trujillo, Peter Frase, Danielle Jackson, and Tim Recuber
Drawing on data from Harlem and Williamsburg, this study argues that while the proliferation of upscale "boutiques" is championed by the state and new investors as a form of revitalization, it ultimately accelerates the displacement of essential services relied upon by lower-class residents.
View Full TextCo-edited with Joanna Fiegel and Stevphen Shukaitis
This special issue critically re-evaluates the radical methodological tradition of "workers' inquiry," exploring its potential to analyze and disrupt contemporary capitalist labor relations through a diverse collection of theoretical reflections and empirical case studies ranging from logistics to the creative arts.
View Full TextCo-authored with Ellen Reese and Teke Wiggin
This chapter critically reviews key ideas and concepts used to analyse workers’ resistance through a international comparison of organizing campaigns at Amazon warehouses.
View Full TextI am available for public comment on the labor movement, with particular expertise in automobile manufacturing, higher education, and the logistics/warehousing sectors.
Public officials should use their bully pulpit to support worker organizing and bargaining
Triangle Amazon workers overwhelmingly vote against unionizing in historic election
Triangle Amazon workers overwhelmingly vote against unionizing in historic election
UAW’s Southern Expansion Is Tested in Alabama as Mercedes Vote Ends