Tamara L. Lee, Esq.
Tamara L. Lee, Esq. (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations. Dr. Lee is an activist-scholar committed to publicly engaged scholarship and the democratization of knowledge through worker-centered and worker-led research. Through the development of Critical Industrial Relations Theory (CIRT), an intersectional approach to labor and employment, Dr. Lee seeks to more deeply account for structural racism and other identity-based hierarchies that impact our understandings of the working class, their organizations, and their movements.
As affiliated CIWO faculty, Dr. Lee’s research on policing and surveillance practices at Amazon fulfillment centers & warehouses supports the inquiry of CIWO partner, Jobs with Justice, and was supported by Oxfam. Dr. Lee also provides guidance on intersectional research methodologies for Saumya Devraj - a visiting Fulbright scholar hosted by CIWO. Dr. Lee’s research centers intersectionality & labor - a recent publication being Confronting Race and Other Social Identity Erasures: The Case for Critical Industrial Relations Theory. Finally Dr. Lee is a steering committee member of the Advancing Black Strategist Initiative (ABSI); Rutgers’ SMLR is an institutional partner.
Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, PhD
Dr. Danielle Phillips-Cunningham is an associate professor in the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Women’s Studies from Spelman College and a doctorate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University. She sits on the Executive Board of the Labor and Working Class History Association and her areas of expertise are women’s labor and migration histories, feminist/womanist theories and research methods, and African American history.
As affiliated CIWO faculty, Dr. Phillips Cunningham co-teaches a course with Dr. Davis entitled “Women Taking the Lead: Race, Gender, and Labor”, this course is jointly available at Rutgers, Spelman College and for fellows of the Advancing Black Strategists Initiative in partnership with Jobs with Justice. Dr. Phillips Cunningham’s award winning book, Putting Their Hands On Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers is taught across labor courses and attends to labor resistance narratives of Black women workers, gender and labor. She also provides feminist labor history workshops for the WILL Empower program.
