Reimagining Transnational Solidarity Through the “Free Angela Davis” Movement

After All Is Said and Done: On Fluid Solidarity and Survival

English language teaching (ELT) is a racially stratified industry that privileges whiteness as a norm. Drawing upon a Women of Colour feminist research design that draws on both racial capitalism and intersectional perspectives, this paper examines the experiences of 18 Chinese women teachers in the ELT industry through an innovative interviewing approach called Tucao. Our study reveals how the ELT industry in China constructs whiteness as a profitable investment for Chinese people – and, in so doing, constructs Chinese women as subordinate, exploitable, and ineffective teachers. These teachers, however, quietly oppose this gendered racism in the workplace. While this study focuses on the Chinese context, the study introduces the concept of ‘White profitability’ to explain how the commodification of whiteness underpins intersectional racism experienced by teachers of colour in the global ELT industry. The study contributes methodologically, empirically and theoretically to the scholarship on racial capitalism, intersectionality, and the commodification of race and gender in educational contexts.

OP 13: Research Methods, B304 (FCSH), September 3, 2025, 17:00 - 18:00Facilitating PAR processes in health research requires strong relationships between researchers, community partners, and participants. High levels of trust are necessary for engaging participants in knowledge production and the development of health-promoting initiatives. However, the emotional labour involved in relational work is often invisible in research.Drawing on the concept of emotional labour, this presentation explores how researchers and participants navigate emotional labour in PAR. We do this to explore how emotional labour affects researchers’ well-being and participant engagement, acknowledging how emotional labour can cause exhaustion but is central for avoiding dropouts.Insights into emotional labour stem from a six-months PAR process involving workshops and trying out physical activities with senior male immigrants and refugees – a diverse group experiencing various challenges, including mental health issues. Seen from an intersectional perspective, the diversity of ethnicities, gender and age differences, as well as distinctions between white academics and underprivileged migrant groups, influenced relationships and group dynamics.Throughout the process, the principal researcher, a white young woman, has continuously negotiated her relationships with the male participants, carefully balancing friendliness with perceived flirtation. Furthermore, she has intentionally cultivated relationships and guided group dynamics by de-escalating tension or reacting to exclusionary behaviour. In doing so, the researcher’s role extends beyond facilitation to active emotional management, ensuring care and inclusion to maintain a supportive research environment – an effort that may take a toll to the researcher.Yet, the male participants also performed emotional labour to sustain their position in the group and manage their challenges, which also caused exhaustion on their part. We argue that examining the emotional labour of both researchers and participants allows for a deeper understanding of the demands of participatory health research.This presentation ends with a discussion on reflexivity as a tool for navigating such emotional labour.

Our special issue critically engages with anti-Blackness in MOS by approaching it from a structural analysis of racial capitalism and how this has been developed by radical Black feminist thought. Our call for papers invited contributions from management scholars and activists that address the systemic discrimination against Black people in organizations and academia, focus on Black peoples’ experiences of embodying difference in these spaces, and highlight efforts at building local and trans-national solidarities against racism and white supremacy. To access different kinds of knowledges about the special issue themes, the guest editors curated a dual-interview between esteemed academic, Professor Stella Nkomo, and up and coming race scholar, PhD student, Patricia Naya. The interview is a collective reflection on the intersection of MOS and anti-Blackness. Both interviewees approached this intersection by centering their positionalities as Black women and reflected on how Black scholarship is innately connected to the struggle to transform academia toward racially just ends.

Since the conception of emotional labor, the impact of race and gender has been prominent. However, few organizational researchers have explored the impact of race and gender on emotional labor experiences. Using a sample of 273 human resources and diversity, equity and inclusion professionals, we investigate the differences in surface acting between Black and White employees. We also take an intersectional perspective and examine the differences in surface acting among White men, Black men, White women, and Black women. Finally, we break it down further by examining the differences in up-regulating and down-regulating of positive and negative emotions among White men, Black men, White women, and Black women. Results indicate that Black women surface act more than others and Black women engage in more regulation of positive emotions than their colleagues. Future research and implications are discussed.

This essay explores discourses of emotional labour in the university novel. It focuses on Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935) and Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love (1961), two novels written at transformational moments when women’s participation in higher education was increasing and the emergence of the welfare state was transforming ideas about the social function of the university. The essay pays particular attention to the various, shifting uses of the word ‘interest’, a phatic expression that connotes both affect and intellect, in depictions of emotional labour. While care has long been understood as a vital part of learning, thinking, and education, Sayers and Pym depict women academics who are ambivalent about performing emotional labour. These novels prefigure ongoing debates about whether universities, and the public sphere more broadly, can be transformed by a feminine ethics which values emotion and relationship building or whether such an ethics of care may enable the exploitation of caregivers and perpetuate a history of female exploitation. As this essay considers how academic work has transformed in the wake of what Arlie Russell Hochschild terms the growth of the ‘care sector’, it explores the forms and affordances of academic emotional labour as well as the spaces, both institutional and symbolic, in which such labour is undertaken.

This article explains entrepreneurial activity patterns in the United Kingdom labour market using theories of racial capitalism and intersectional feminism. Using UK Office for National Statistics Labour Force Survey data 2018–2019 and employing probit modelling techniques on employment modes, self-employment types and work arrangements among differing groups, we investigate inequality in self-employment within and between socio-structural groupings of race, class and gender. We find that those belonging to non-dominant gender, race and socio-economic class groupings experience an intersecting set of entrepreneurial penalties, enhancing understanding of the ways multiple social hierarchies interact in self-employment patterns. This robust quantitative evidence challenges contemporary debates, policy and practice regarding the potential for entrepreneurship to offer viable income generation opportunities by those on the socio-economic margins.

Purpose This paper examines how platform economies extract value from the exclusionary dimensions of migration regimes to drive accumulation. Through the lens of racial capitalism, we analyze how informality functions as a key mechanism in shaping novel forms of racialization, labor stratification and devaluation. Design/methodology/approach This study draws on cross-sectoral qualitative research based on in-depth interviews with migrant workers in cleaning, care delivery and multitask platforms in Madrid. We use a racial capitalism framework to explore the intersections between informality, exclusionary border regimes, platform labor and migrant agency. Findings Informality appears as a structural logic of platformization. We identify three critical ways in which platforms intersect with informality and precarious migration statuses: through account subletting practices; the amplification of racialized profiles assigned to specific types of work; and the emergence of new forms of violence shaped by intersections of gender, race and migratory status. Nevertheless, we underscore the dual role of informality not only as a driver for exploitation but also as a terrain where solidarities take shape. Originality/value The key contributions of this paper lie in its cross-sectoral analysis of platform labor, shifting the focus from specific working conditions to the structural dynamics inherent to platform economies, integrating an intersectional perspective into the study of labor experiences on digital platforms. We move beyond the conventional dichotomy between migrant vulnerability and traditional unionism, exploring alternative agencies and solidarity networks emerging within these contexts.

abstractCare work is often feminised and invisible. Intangible components of care, such as emotional labour, are rarely recognised as economically valuable. Men engaging in care work can be stigmatised or simply made invisible for non-conformance to gender norms (Dworzanowski-Venter, 2008). Mburu et al (2014) and Chikovore et al (2016) have studied masculinity from an intersectional perspective, but male caregiving has not enjoyed sufficient intersectional focus. Intersectional analysis of male caregiving has the twin benefits of making ‘women’s work’ visible and finding ways to keep men involved in caring occupations. I foreground the class-gender intersection in this study of black male caregivers as emotional labourers involved in palliative care work in Gauteng (2005–2013). Informal AIDS care and specialist oncology nursing are contrasting cases of male care work presented in this article.Findings suggest that caregiving men interviewed for this study act in gender-disruptive ways and face a stigmatising social backlash in post-colonial South Africa. Oncology nursing has a professional cachet denied to informal sector caregivers. This professional status acts as a class-based insulator against oppressive gender-based stigma, for oncology nursing more closely aligns to an idealised masculinity. The closer to a ‘respectable’ middle-class identity, or bourgeois civility, the better for these men, who idealise traditionally white male formal sector occupations. However, this insulating effect relies on a denial of emotional aspects of care by male cancer nurses and a lack of activism around breaking down gendered notions of care work. Forming a guild of informal sector AIDs caregivers could add much-needed professional recognition and provide an organisational base for gender norm disruption through activism. This may help to retain more men in informal sector caregiving roles and challenge the norms that are used to stigmatise male caregiving work in general.

The introduction analyzes how ideas of the future and futurity shape the labor and lives of agents working in India’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. Providing customer service to Global North customers, this industry brings together global capitalism, racial capitalism, semiocapitalism, and affective capitalism into an assemblage of interwoven and discontinuous components. The BPO industry is future-oriented, forever reinventing itself to stay ahead of capitalist, technological, and geopolitical transformations. Futures, subjectively and collectively imagined, are distinct from futurity, which refers to affective-temporal potentialities that generate action and subjectivity. Futurity refers to the capacity to imagine or strive for a future. Futurity is a second-order phenomenon that is not observable but is generative of futures that could be articulated. The chapter explores how we can think about the future of futurity in contexts of affective labor and racial capitalism.

About the Contributors

Tillsammans Means Overlapping Edges, as in Tiles or Scales: Feeling Translation Jennifer Hayashida (bio) But there’s a way in which, trying to translate from your experience to mine, I do need to hear chapter and verse from time to time. I’m afraid of it all slipping away into: “Ah, yes, I understand you.” —Audre Lorde, “Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich: An Interview with Audre Lorde”1 I started writing in my sophomore year after reading the poet Adrienne Rich and thinking: this is almost right but does not quite say what I want to say . . . —Claudia Rankine2 1 “We were hoping for an essay about Claudia Rankine’s work and tentatively about Citizen. We would love if you would write for ________ regarding this.” For, or together with, a selection from the Swedish edition of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. [End Page 215] A kind of transnational solidarity work, repeated attempts by the editors and I to compare our analyses regarding language, race, and migration, a joint poetics of here and there. It is always a different thing to consider the afterlife of the translated text, how it is read—by whose bodies and for whom? I consider the racialized body an instrument in the work of translation, a potential decolonial saboteur. The translator can be an (un)settler. The translator can be a settler. This is a translation from the Swedish, my translation of a failure, a recycling of the disaster.3 [End Page 216] 2 Racism and xenophobia. Apart and Together. In Sweden—here—the latter is seen as part and parcel of the former. Any distinctions made between the two may be perceived as undermining the political claims of both. Acknowledge the situational imbrication of the two terms. Try to explain how they are weaponized as both together and apart in U.S. antiblack and yellow peril discourse. Use 1996, Bill Clinton’s second term, to illustrate overlapping edges, as in tiles or scales: The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act The strategic deployment of overlapping edges against nonwhite bodies within U.S. logics of empire and racial capitalism. “An Dilemma: The Problem and Democracy was, Mr. Myrdal once said, ‘not a study of the but of the American from the viewpoint of the most disadvantaged group.’”4 Swedish concern about the “American dilemma” while Sweden still operated the State Institute for Racial Biology (1922–1958), brainchild of the Swedish Society for Eugenics. [End Page 217] 3 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Nina Mangalanayagam, “Balancing Act,” 2012. Black-and-white still image taken from ten-minute split-screen HD video installation. Translation is the method by which I gather the data of my embodiment.5 Attempt to translate Black Lives Matter into Swedish: a. It’s about Black Lives b. Black Lives Are Important c. Black Lives Affect A BLM solidarity video produced by the political party Feministiskt Initiativ (FI!) transforms the rallying cry into a solemn Black . . . Lives . . . Matter, the protracted enunciation a method of translation.6 [End Page 218] English should not be the language of solidarity. I am twenty-two years old, watching the OJ Simpson trial on Swedish television. One of the LAPD detectives is on the stand. —Did you collect swatches on the crime scene? —Yes, we took Swatch watches, the on-screen captioning (un)translates. The racialized spectacle of the trial reminded me of where and what I came from, my cultural and political heritage, my racist homeland. Swedish liberal claims of tillsammans suddenly more sinister than that LA courtroom. Perhaps what is true for the untranslatability of fuck you is also true for BLM: it’s English-only, even in translation. A language where afrofobi can contain a chasm of antiblack feelings in atonal harmony with afrofili, white Swedes’ delight when they shop at AfroArt. Zora Neale Hurston translated by Glenn Ligon: (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), a piece from Untitled Four Etchings (1992), included in the first section of Citizen. After FI!’s BLM solidarity video, YouTube’s...

Purpose This paper examines how platform economies extract value from the exclusionary dimensions of migration regimes to drive accumulation. Through the lens of racial capitalism, we analyze how informality functions as a key mechanism in shaping novel forms of racialization, labor stratification and devaluation. Design/methodology/approach This study draws on cross-sectoral qualitative research based on in-depth interviews with migrant workers in cleaning, care, delivery and multitask platforms in Madrid. We use a racial capitalism framework to explore the intersections between informality, exclusionary border regimes, platform labor and migrant agency. Findings Informality appears as a structural logic of platformization. We identify three critical ways in which platforms intersect with informality and precarious migration statuses: through account subletting practices, the amplification of racialized profiles assigned to specific types of work and the emergence of new forms of violence shaped by intersections of gender, race and migratory status. Nevertheless, we underscore the dual role of informality, not only as a driver for exploitation but also as a terrain where solidarities take shape. Originality/value The key contributions of this paper lie in its cross-sectoral analysis of platform labor, shifting the focus from specific working conditions to the structural dynamics inherent to platform economies and integrating an intersectional perspective into the study of labor experiences on digital platforms. We move beyond the conventional dichotomy between migrant vulnerability and traditional unionism, exploring alternative agencies and solidarity networks emerging within these contexts.

Brazil’s Amazonian quilombos (communities descended from self-liberated slaves) have formed through grassroots mobilization in the crucible of coloniality, White supremacy, capitalism, and neocolonialism. This essay examines the historical dynamics of racial capitalism in and around Brazil’s quilombos, the diverse economies that have undergirded quilombo world making, and the authors’ attempts to engage in decolonial solidarity as White allies from the Global North. These reflections focus on three strategies that have seemed particularly important for solidarity work: (1) engaging in decolonial dialogues based on listening, responding, and acting to ensure that decolonization is more than a metaphor; (2) building terra firme, a form of institutionalization grounded in quilombo institutions rather than NGO-ization; and (3) operating as a weak current, a form of development practice analogous to J. K. Gibson-Graham’s vision of a “weak theory” that is humble, contingent, and yielding.

The NGO sector is not only a contentious site in which global and national politics materializes, but also where precarity manifests itself unevenly in the gendered, racialized, and classed bodies that inhabit those spaces. In China, NGOs have become the major forms through which feminist and LGBT grassroots organizing take shape since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. This paper examines how state repression and the neoliberal logics of professionalization within NGOization politicize and precaritize feminist and LGBT rights-based work. Building on critical scholarship bridging analysis of precarity as a labor condition with the notion of ontological precariousness, this paper explores how feminist and LGBT activist-workers in China negotiate labor/work along the hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, urbanity/rurality, and seniority. I argue that precarity is both material and affective, manifesting in the differential devaluation and exploitation of activist workers’ emotional and physical labor, particularly for those facing compounded forms of oppression due to their intersectional identities, as well as the silencing of difficult feelings by hierarchical relations within movement spaces. I suggest that the feelings that fuel the resistance—such as hope, desire, and camaraderie—often lead to structurally unrealizable aspirations and reproduce racial, class, and age disparities within NGOs. It produces unintended and contradictory affective consequences of mental fatigue, frustration, and feelings of betrayal that further perpetuate precarity. This paper contributes to advancing not only state-centered studies of feminist and LGBT activism but also global aid and development literature from perspectives of labor precarity, affect, and intersectionality.