Researcher Profile: Katherine Nastovski, PhD

August 25, 2021

GLRC Faculty Associate Katherine Nastovski was interviewed by GLRC Placement Student Rubina Karyar for our Researcher Profile series. Dr. Nastovski is an Assistant Professor in in the Work and Labour Studies Program within the Department of Social Science at York University. Find her faculty profile here.

INTERVIEW

Rubina Karyar: Tell us about the work you are doing now related to work, labour, and livelihoods.

Katherine Nastovski: Thank you for that question. My research comes out of my organizing in the labour movement. I was primarily involved in international workers’ solidarity organizing inside the Canadian Union of Public Employees and with others across wider workers’ justice networks. As part of my activism, I found that there had not been much research done on transnational global dimensions of Canadian worker activism. So, I started this as a side project to map the history of this work in order to make sense of some of the barriers we were facing. It eventually became my doctoral research and has now evolved into what will be a book next year through the University of Toronto Press. The book extends my doctoral research, and it looks at the transnational dimensions of Canadian workers’ justice organizing from the late 1940s to the present.

My publications have been mostly related to this research. I started with the early Cold War institutionalized transnational policies and programs. Some might refer to it as a form of labour imperialism; they were very much rooted in the Cold War. I examined the racial, gender, and class dimension based on four cases in the 1940s and ’50s in Kenya; Southeast Asia as part of the Colombo Plan; the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica and Guyana; and Palestine.

Through these cases, I look at the different ways in which Canadian workers and leaders saw their role globally, what informed their transnational practices, and how this related to their vision of workers’ justice. For instance, I examine some of the ways in which white supremacist and settler-colonial informed ideas shaped the strategies they adopted to achieve workers’ justice. The remainder of the book analyzes counter-movements to the institutionalized practices that existed. These counter-movements were weaker in the early Cold War after the purges of various communist parties, unions, and other left organizers. However, by the late 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, stronger counter-movements emerged and included activity by workers on the ground engaged in shop floor direct action in solidarity around the coup in Chile, South African apartheid, and the Central American struggles. I am currently finishing the final chapter of the book, which explores the post-Cold War period, including some of the ways the post 9/11 ideological challenges have shifted the way unions engage in international labour solidarity.

I see my research as making empirical, theoretical, and practical contributions to the field. Empirically, my work is rooted in broad archival work and interviews with over seventy labour activists, leaders, and staff. I hope that this work can serve as a resource for future research in this area. Labour Studies has traditionally been nationally oriented. Theoretically, my work addresses this by advancing a critical transnational lens to workers’ justice that analyzes class through a social and historical lens by considering the racial and gender dimensions of class formation and relations. This means rethinking dominant narratives around Canadian labour, and who constitutes a worker within the context of settler colonialism. On the practical level, as I said, initially, this came out of a need or a desire on the part of labour organizers to understand this history and what some of the barriers are to doing and expanding this work.

RK: How do you position this work in your broader program of research and your particular discipline?

KN:  In the Canadian context, other than the very important work on migrant workers, there has not been a lot of attention to the transnational global dimensions of labour. So that is what I see, where I situate myself as supporting ongoing research on these global dimensions and towards developing a broader critical transnational lens to issues of workers’ justice.

RK:  What are you curious about, and what do you hope to pursue in the future?

KN: The next phase of my research plan centers on two core areas related to my goals as an activist academic. The first aspect of my research vision is my commitment to expanding the research on labour transnationalism through community-engaged research. The second aspect of this plan is my longer-term vision of supporting capacity building for workers’ justice organizing more generally by creating space for research and worker education.

The first step in my longer-term vision will start by evaluating past efforts to build sustained collaborative research that directly advances the work of organizers and to expand worker education programs beyond unionized workers.

After mapping these past practices, I will work to bring together activist academics and organizers from unions and other workers’ justice organizations to discuss the different models and to identify some priority areas for collaboration. Luckily, in an area like Labour Studies, there are lots of other activist-minded academics that are interested in facilitating research and education collaborations that can support both immediate campaign needs and the broader capacity building goals of workers’ justice organizations.

RK: How did you get started in this field?

KN: I come out of a theory-based perspective. My undergrad and my Master’s degrees were both in Philosophy, but I was always an activist. While I did some workers’ justice organizing as a student, I did not become active as a trade unionist until after my undergrad. I started by organizing my workplace and then serving on my local union executive during my Master’s. The specific questions that shaped my doctoral research emerged out of my role doing international workers’ solidarity work inside the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

RK: Whose research is inspiring you now/are you engaged with now?

KN: I am working through an anti-racist Marxist feminist lens, drawing on the work of people like Himani Bannerji, thinking about class as a lived experience, something that is social, and that cannot be divorced from our experiences of gender, and race, and nation. I see myself as an activist academic. And what I will continue to do in the future is rooted in what I think is useful for organizing. I feel responsible to labour activists and organizers, both in unions and alternative labour organizations, and what they need to strengthen their work.

RK: How do you use, or envision using, creative ways to disseminate your research?

KN: I was engaged in some non-traditional forms of knowledge dissemination during a union-academic conference I organized on labour transnationalism at McMaster University in 2017. For instance, we organized an art exhibit on the history of international workers’ solidarity in Canada. That was fun. We also created videos. In the future I would like to make use of other forms of popular knowledge dissemination that already exist within workers’ justice organizations and networks, i.e., social media groups, independent labour media platforms, and union newsletters and websites.