Admittedly I am still reeling from the success of our conference Maid in the USA. During the next couple of weeks we will be posting more follow up from the conference, including a set of FAQs that was compiled by one of the CMGC policy options undergraduate students and a digest of the notes that were taken at each round table regarding potential next steps for organizing in New Jersey.
Because domestic labor is a major interest of mine, in part because of its significance to my family history and the centrality of its history to my scholarship, I am going to be maintaining the blog as a space for my own thoughts as I continue the intellectual journey that is qualifying exams and dissertation writing and musings on the contemporary state of domestic worker activism as it builds momentum across the country.
In the mean time check out this video by John Meyer, an undergraduate student in Arts, Culture, and Media, who took some footage of the conference and created something really cool.
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As you can see by the delay between posts the conference admittedly left me quite overwhelmed. We had a wonderful turn out from students, faculty, and community activists/advocates and are busily trying to figure out what role CMGC will play in continuing the momentum.
Almost a hundred people attended the conference over the course of the day. Both students and faculty were incredible engaged, particularly during our round table discussions, which produced a great deal of fantastic ideas about how we can move forward in advocating for domestic worker rights in New Jersey. One of our panelists, Marisol Hernandez, from the New Jersey Dream Act Coalition, is a Rutgers graduate, and she really brought to light the significance of this issue to our students in particular.
One of the most fulfilling aspects of planning the conference, for me, was working with a fantastic group of undergraduate students who helped us with everything from publicity to research to registration. I also had the opportunity to sit in on a number of classes, both graduate and undergraduate, that were reading Mary Romero’s work and engaging the issue of domestic work from a number of different intellectual perspectives.
One such class was the Seminar in Arts, Culture, and Media, where students created multimedia projects inspired by creative works, scholarly texts, social media, and even government testimonies all relating to the issue of domestic work and its place in contemporary America.
This was a collaborative project and each group of students created an online exhibition of their collective work. Below is just a sample of some of the fantastic projects that were done. Click the exhibition titles for links to the full exhibitions, which include artist statements.
