Kathleen Dunn

Student Fellow

Kathleen Dunn is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a Writing Fellow at Brooklyn College. Her dissertation explores the role of labor in the politics of public space through an analysis of street vendor organizing in New York City. Her research focuses on issues of urban theory, globalization and stratification, and gender and sexuality. She is a co-founder of Formations: The Graduate Center Journal of Social Research.

Participating Years

2010–2011

Labor/Crisis/Protest

Labor processes and conditions of employment in almost all sectors of the economy and most of the world have been revolutionized over the last thirty years. Generally, the share of wages in gross domestic product has declined while the share taken by capital (finance in particular) has soared. The response (or lack of it) to these new conditions has been patchy, raising questions of the state of political consciousness and political subjectivity among affected populations. Where, many ask, is the outrage and why the lack of mass protest and mass movement?