Harmony Goldberg

Student Fellow

Harmony Goldberg is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Her research focuses on organizing among domestic workers in New York City, focusing on the work of Domestic Workers United. Harmony received her BA in American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998. Harmony is a long-time movement educator and writer. She is a founder and former Co-Director of SOUL: the School Of Unity and Liberation (www.schoolofunityandliberation.org), a social justice movement training center based in Oakland, California. After leaving SOUL, Harmony has focused on providing political education and writing support to local community organizations in New York City (including FIERCE and Domestic Workers United) and emergent national alliances of grassroots organizations based in working class communities of color, primarily the Right to the City Alliance, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Excluded Workers Congress. She is also a founding editor of Organizing Upgrade (www.organizingupgrade.com), an online strategy journal for left organizers in the United States. Her writing has appeared in Left Turn and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.

Participating Years

2011–2012

How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture

In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?