Alma and Clifford Pearson Distinguished Speakers Series

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork of men working as day laborers in a casual street-corner market in New York, Dr. Carolyn Pinedo Turnovsky will show how these workers developed a self-concept through their work experience and illustrate the active role they played in shaping their economic and social experiences.

She will also point to tacit rules of accountability that transpired in the daily social practices among the laborers. These informal arrangements offer law and policy makers a model of civility and responsibility that has increasingly been dismissed in labor relations under the global economy.

Dr. Turnovsky, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is currently writing a manuscript about the community of day laborers in New York City.

Admission is free.