Friday, February 16, 2024 | 12pm to 1pm
Online Talk
Note: Discussion limited to CUNY faculty, staff and students.
In recent years, New York City’s food delivery workers, a largely Asian and Latina/o immigrant workforce, have struggled against being characterized and policed as public safety “problems” even as these same workers became essential but unprotected during the Covid-19 pandemic. Against this backdrop, our participatory action research (PAR) project with NYC food delivery workers helped illuminate the conditions, contexts, memories, and desires of delivery workers. This research illustrates a potential form of scholar-activism through the metaphor of investigating desire paths or lines, the informal, unauthorized dirt paths made by footsteps of many people who want to get from one place to another in the most direct way. With the stories and experiences of immigrant delivery workers, researching desire paths help unsettle the unequal power relations of knowledge production by involving temporal connections of re-membering that explicitly center a community’s collective memories and desires that underpin the messy processes of bottom-up collective action. To better unpack the temporality of desire paths of delivery workers, Prof. Do Jun Lee mobilizes han, an indigenous Korean word for the inherited and collective emotions of transgenerational trauma from systematic oppressions. As such, understanding how and why food delivery workers are simultaneously “essential” and a “problem” is to re-member the intertwined and complex histories of place, migrations, mobilities, labor, and governance, which opens up possibilities for redefining the “problem.”
