Teaching

Tamara Kay

Assistant Professor of Sociology

Biographical Note

TAMARA KAY is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of Harvard's Transnational Studies Initiative. 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.

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Professor Kay received her Ph.D. from Berkeley in December 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. Although her research covers a wide range of topics, it emerges from a primary interest in political sociology. Her work centers on the political and legal implications of regional economic integration, transnationalism, and global governance. She is interested in how organizations and social movements — particularly labor and environmental movements, and NGOs and non-profits — respond and adapt to processes of regional economic integration and globalization.

Professor Kay's first book "NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism" will be published in 2010. 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. Her second book (co-authored with Rhonda Evans) examines the extraordinary politicization of U.S. trade policy that began with NAFTA, the surprising ability of environmental and labor activists to make their concerns central to NAFTA's passage, and the unexpected privileging of environmental over labor demands in the negotiating process.

Professor Kay is currently working on a third book that focuses on transnational relationships between NGOs in the U.S. and developing countries — particularly how they negotiate cultural issues — and the effects of different organizational structures and strategies on development outcomes. She has completed field work in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Nigeria, and has trips to South Africa and India this year.

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 Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations.

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.

01/11/2010

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564 William James Hall
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138