Katherine Maich

Biography:

Katherine Eva Maich holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law & Society. Katherine was recently a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State, and her research examines the reproduction of gender and racial inequality, domestic worker organizing, and the home as a site of labor. Her book project, Bringing Law Home: Regulating Domestic Workers’ Rights in Lima and New York City, draws upon more than 18 months of ethnography and 120 in-depth interviews to show how progressive labor laws for domestic workers are stifled by historically-entrenched patterns of colonial and racialized relations in those two cities. Katherine’s work has been funded by the American Association of University Women American Dissertation Fellowship, the Inter-American Foundation’s Grassroots Development Fellowship (IIE), and the Mellon Latin American Sociology Fellowship, and her dissertation was recognized with the Honorable Mention in LERA’s 2018 Thomas A. Kochan and Stephen R. Sleigh Best Dissertation Award Competition.

Katherine’s other work won the 2017 Cheryl Allen Miller Paper Award from Sociologists for Women in Society, the 2017 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award from the Sociology of Law Section of the ASA, and the 2016 Distinguished Graduate Student Paper Award from the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the ASA. A member of the Research Network for Domestic Worker Rights, she has worked for the International Domestic Workers’ Federation (IDWF) and collaborated with UCLA’s research team, Experiences Organizing Informal Workers. Katherine holds a Master of Science in Labor Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where her thesis won the Outstanding Feminist Scholarship Award.

Areas of Interest:

Labor informality, Domestic work, Gender and Feminist Theory, Law, Social Movements, Ethnography, Latin America, the Global South