Katy Fox-Hodess is a doctoral candidate in Sociology and Leo Lowenthal Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, Dockworkers of the World Unite: Transnational Class Formation and the New Labor Internationalism, examines the construction of ‘bottom-up’ labor internationalism by rank-and-file dockworker union activists affiliated to the International Dockworkers Council. The project is a global organizational ethnography that employs a nested multi-level comparison of union coordination in response to recent labor disputes in Europe (Greece, Portugal, England) and Latin America (Chile, Colombia). Spanning four years, the research, conducted in forty cities in twenty countries, is comprised of over eighty in-depth interviews, as well as participant observation at a dozen international meetings of dockworker union activists, and analysis of union archival documents and media reporting of key disputes. The first article to be published from her dissertation appeared in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, with funding from the International Dissertation Research Fellowship of the Social Science Research Council.
While she currently works on contemporary labor internationalism among dockworkers unions, she is interested more broadly in examining processes of contemporary and historical class formation within the context of a global political economy. Her research and teaching interests include labor, globalization, political sociology, political economy and social theory.
