Bearing Inequality: Pregnancy, Racialization, and Temporal Injustice among New York City’s Low-Wage Workers

Elise Andaya, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University at Albany, will discuss findings from her new book, Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice (NYU Press, 2024).

Drawing on research among pregnant low-wage service workers in New York City, Andaya considers how inequalities of gender, race, and class are reproduced and experienced through the social organization of time. The temporal rhythms that structure low-wage work and safety net health care are constantly at odds, creating conflict and stress for the predominantly low-income women of color who must work to reconcile them. Andaya shows how inequitable and often punitive forms of temporal control—what she calls temporal injustice—are embedded into everyday practice, reflecting and reproducing “common sense” understandings of the differential value assigned to classed, raced, and gendered persons. Attention to temporal injustice thus suggests how social inequality is (re)produced in and through pregnant bodies, social institutions, and potentially across the generations, raising fundamental questions of how we think about and value forms of care in a deeply stratified society.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Arts & Sciences Deans.