TAMARA KAY is Professor of Global Affairs and Sociology at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She works on issues of trade, labor, social movements, globalization, culture, organizations, and global health (including reproductive health and rights).
Professor Kay is also Editor of Studies in Comparative International Development, a leading interdisciplinary journal on economic development (with a new online presence).
She began her academic career at Harvard where she was Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of Harvard's Transnational Studies Initiative. She also taught at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Kay received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 (where she helped build a union for graduate student workers) 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 engages two primary areas: transnational political economy, with a focus on labor and social movements, and; transnational culture, centered on how cultural processes work in a globalized world. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Harvard Medical School, among others.
Raised in New York, Professor Kay received her B.A. in sociology and art theory and practice from Northwestern University, where she studied painting with Ed Paschke and James Valerio (her great grandfather was the British painter, designer and illustrator John Illingworth Kay, who designed for the Silver Studio in London which contributed to the development of British Art Nouveau). At the University of California, Berkeley she also studied photography and film with David Bacon, Harun Farocki, Gilles Peress, Alice Shaw, Kaja Silverman, and Michelle Vignes. You can find her photos at: tamarakay.com.
Copyright note: Tamara Kay owns the copyright to all photos of her and her work on this website. They may not be reposted or used in any way without her written permission.
Gratitude
Many thanks to my wonderful colleagues at Notre Dame for supporting me, academic freedom, civility, and human dignity against a targeted harassment campaign by a very very very tiny group of not very kind people at Notre Dame.
My academic and policy work on the horrific outcomes of abortion bans continues because we face a grave public health and human rights crisis in this country after the Dobbs decision.
The overwhelming interest in this work has led me to hire someone to handle all my email/mail, social media and press so that I don’t have to look at it and can just focus on my work. Only work-related and kind emails will be passed along to me (harassing ones will be sent to the police), and I apologize for the delay in getting back to you.
Professor Kay and her Co-Pi’s win a $1 million National Science Foundation grant:
"Bridging AI Inequality in Digitally-Mediated Gig Work."
This research project seeks to study and mitigate the growing inequality between platforms and workers in digitally-mediated gig work caused by artificial intelligence (AI). The project specifically targets app-based ridesharing, a newly emerging industry with more than 1.5 million drivers in the United States as of 2023. In ridesharing, concerns of inequality such as income disparities and workplace discrimination are frequently observed and reported. The project will first measure and characterize such AI inequality in rideshare platforms. Based on the derived insights, the research team will design, create, and deploy an AI-enabled data-driven decision-making support system for drivers to help them plan for their work in their best interests, with a long-term goal of bridging AI inequality in rideshare platforms. Outcomes from this project will also benefit other domains of on-demand gig work with algorithmic management, such as online freelancing and data annotation.
NEW PUBLICATION
Please check out my newly published article on the Coproduction of Sesame Street Around the World. Here’s a free link (below). It’s a fun read, the theory is compelling and relevant to organizations, culture, and globalization scholars, and all the data is incredible.
Kay, Tamara. 2022. “Culture in Transnational Interaction: How Organizational Partners Coproduce Sesame Street.” Theory and Society. Published online July 22, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09484-2
Given the extraordinary politicization of culture in an era of globalization, it is surprising that Sesame Street has gained acceptance and legitimacy in more than fifty countries during the last five decades. Sesame Street’s ubiquity around the world presents us with the question I address in this article: how do partner organizations work together, on the ground, to locally adapt a hybrid cultural product? Using data from real-time interactions between NY staff and partners, I show how teams from different cultures who do not share collective representations are able to create them through transnational interaction by: (1) constructing value to align their interests (2) exchanging complex cultural knowledge to customize and build alliances together. The Sesame Street case, then, allows us to grapple with “culture in interaction” at the transnational level, shedding light on culture in transnational interaction.