Teaching

Tamara Kay

Assistant Professor of Sociology

Biographical Note

TAMARA KAY is Assistant Professor of Sociology. She received a dual B.A. in sociology and art theory and practice (with a concentration in painting) from Northwestern University in 1993. After graduating from Northwestern, she worked at the American Bar Foundation, the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago, and the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C. In 1995 she worked as a volunteer HIV/AIDS educator in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Professor Kay received her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2004 and spent two years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her work centers on the political and legal implications of regional economic integration, transnationalism, and global governance. Her research agenda stems from a commitment to better articulate how regional economic integration affects workers and labor movements. In particular, she is concerned with how labor movements respond to changes in the global political economy and to the creation and development of global governance institutions and international legal structures. She is also interested in how these changes in the international arena affect the relationship between social movements and nation-states.

Professor Kay has published in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review. She is currently writing a book that addresses the nature of transnationalism in the context of North American regional economic integration. It explores why trinational relationships developed among some Canadian, U.S., and Mexican labor unions at the precise moment when regional economic integration reached its peak, and why the same staggering changes had little, if any impact on other unions. She is also working on a project that examines union strategies in the context of legal constraint, and the labor movement’s increasing use of strategies and discourses that focus on human rights.

Professor Kay has worked as a consultant to the International Labour Organization, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, and the United Farmworkers of America. At Harvard, she has affiliations with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Transnational Studies Initiative. She teaches graduate qualitative methods and an undergraduate course on law and social movements. Future courses include globalization, political sociology, social movements, and “Photography and Sociology: Documenting Social Problems through Text and Image.”

Professor Kay was raised in Harrison, New York, a small town 25 miles north of Manhattan where her family has lived for five generations and her great great uncle was mayor for 30 years. In addition to strong local ties, she also has strong transnational ties, holding both U.S. and Irish citizenship. An avid photographer, Professor Kay focuses on documentary and street photography and has shot projects in Mexico, Peru and Paris. Her work has been exhibited and used commercially. She also plays the French horn, flute and piano, loves to salsa and Irish dance, and is a dedicated, though very slow runner who hopes one day to run the Boston marathon.

Publications

Evans, Rhonda and Tamara Kay. 2008. "How Environmentalists 'Greened' Trade Policy Under NAFTA: Strategic Action and the Architecture of Field Overlap." American Sociological Review 73(6): 970-991.

Kay, Tamara. 2005. "Labor Transnationalism and Global Governance: The Impact of NAFTA on Transnational Labor Relationships in North America." American Journal of Sociology 111(3): 715-756.

Beisel, Nicola and Tamara Kay. 2004. "Abortion, Race, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century America." American Sociological Review 69(4): 498-518.

Other publications include: "Even Labor Unions Can Gain from Free Trade," in YaleGlobal Online (December 23, 2003). Professor Kay also authored "Regional Integration and Free Trade in the Americas: The Labour Challenge in NAFTA," and contributed to "The Labour Dimension within Regional Integration and the Free Trade Agreements in the Americas," both published by the International Labour Organization.

11/23/2009

Courses Offered This Academic Year

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617-495-3825 (Phone)
617-496-5794 (FAX)

564 William James Hall
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138