Introduction Ujju Aggarwal (bio) and Linta Varghese (bio) In recent years, a diverse range of actors have emphasized the need to come together, to join forces in and against the context of escalating ecological disaster, permanent war and empire, violence against women, growing economic precarity, the prison industrial complex, and heightened state-sanctioned racism and xenophobia. On one hand, calls to come together can expand our political horizons by foregrounding the relationality of struggle that moves us beyond single issues and allyship. Indeed, unlikely, subversive alliances have disrupted power relations and in doing so, expanded liberatory paths and political futures. However, appeals to come together can also do the opposite and reinscribe structures and logics of hierarchical differentiation. For example, as scholars who challenge the limits of reform demonstrate, efforts that claim to contest structured inequalities through a joining of mutual interests are often circumscribed by their failure to uproot the foundations that have produced these injustices (Gorz 1964; Bell Jr. 1980; Gilmore and Gilmore 2008; Berger, Kaba, and Stein 2017). Likewise, feminist theory calls attention to the contradictory nature of collective action that does not transform power as well as the limits and significance of situated knowledge (Alexander 1994; Boris 1989; Collins 2002; Crenshaw 1991; Lorde 1984; Rajan 2003). This volume’s focus on the possibilities and limitations of coming together is rooted in our commitment to traditions of organizing that center the gendered dimensions of local and global structural violence. These have included struggles against settler colonialism and Black freedom, anti-colonial, and internationalist struggles. This commitment informs how we approach our scholarship: educational justice for Ujju and domestic [End Page 13] worker organizing for Linta. In the United States, where we both conduct our research, domestic work and education have been sites through which the significance of race, gender, class, and region are articulated. They have also been sites where protracted efforts have expanded notions of citizenship, social reproduction, and solidarity. As scholars who have, to varying degrees, been involved in work to advance these struggles, we have noticed the increased promotion of tactics which foreground cohesion and mutuality as partial solutions to the crises in education and care. In our work, we questioned how these solutions, grounded in logics of voluntarism and pragmatism, might be indicative of a (Gramscian) commonsense that constrains our political imaginary; and what thinking through the contradictions that we encountered might illuminate about our particular historical conjuncture. Linta began her research in the early 2000s examining domestic worker organizing in the South Asian community in New York City at Workers Awaaz, a now-defunct South Asian workers’ center. Workers Awaaz emerged in 1999 from a rupture at the anti–domestic violence group, Sakhi for South Asian Women. This was caused by the perceived inability of the regional/racial identity “South Asian” (around which Sakhi mobilized) to adequately address the various divisions within the community, particularly the gendered class subjectivities produced through low-wage domestic labor, and the structural violence that shaped this. Once Workers Awaaz became an independent organization, leadership instituted bylaws cognizant of class divisions within the community, including one stating that no member could employ a domestic worker as the worker-employer relationship was a “naturally” antagonistic one, and thus antithetical to the organization’s mission. A decade later, Linta briefly worked at a national nonprofit, Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Network (HiH), which was part of the broader domestic worker movement in the United States. HiH focused on people who employed domestic workers, or domestic employers in the organization’s parlance. Emerging in 2005 from an employer engagement strategy that was critical to the passing of the New York State Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, a campaign led by the member based organization Domestic Workers United, HiH eventually moved from an allyship model to one of mutual interest between the employer and the domestic worker. In this theory-of-change the two parties could come together through the shared experience of care—the giving of it and the need for it. This [End Page 14] manifested most frequently in the mantra “quality care for the employer and quality work for the worker” and the oft repeated statement that...