Dr. Katherine Maich comes to us from Pennsylvania State University. Her teaching and research interests include law, gender, labor informality, domestic work, ethnography, and the Global South. Dr. Maich's research examines dynamics of inequality in the workplace and the extent to which external factors such as law, regulation and policy mitigate those dynamics, and with what consequences.
With funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the Inter-American Foundation, Dr. Maich's book, Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights, draws from over 24 months of ethnography in Lima, Peru and New York City, 120 in-depth interviews, and analysis of legislative transcripts. Through a Global South/North comparison, it focuses on the home as a site of paid labor and as a microcosm of social and symbolic boundaries, bringing feminist theory, race, gender and migration into conversation with law and labor legislation.
One of her current projects (with Hilary Wething of the Economic Policy Institute) explores the effects of paid family leave on maternal mental health and time use for new mothers, and the second project (in collaboration with Oxfam America and Rural Sociology colleagues at Penn State) examines the reproduction of gender and racial inequality for migrant poultry plant and meatpacking plant workers.
Dr. Maich has previously worked as a consultant for the International Labour Organization and the International Domestic Worker Federation by conducting fieldwork in Uruguay, Hong Kong, and South Africa on the complexities of domestic worker organizing at the international level. Drawing connections from community-based local and global social movements in practice provides inspiration for her own research and writing.