Legalized Inequalities

Kate L. Griffith is the Jean McKelvey-Alice Grant Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Diversity, and Faculty Development at Cornell’s ILR School. She is also an associate member of the Cornell Law faculty. A Research Fellow affiliated with NYU’s Center for Labor & Employment Law, Professor Griffith’s scholarship focuses primarily on the intersection of immigration and workplace law and legal issues affecting low-wage workers.

The author of articles in leading law reviews and co-author of two books, Professor Griffith joined Cornell in the fall of 2007 after completing a Skadden Fellowship as a staff attorney at the Workers’ Rights Law Center of New York, Inc. Prior to the Skadden Fellowship, Professor Griffith served as a Law Clerk for the Honorable Rosemary S. Pooler in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Professor Griffith is a cum laude graduate of NYU School of Law, where she was a Root Tilden Public Interest Scholar, received the Sol D. Kapelsohn Prize for highest excellence in writing in the field of labor law, and served as the Editor-in-Chief of the NYU Review of Law and Social Change.

Before earning her J.D. from NYU, Professor Griffith conducted research on women workers and labor law in Mexico as a Rotary Scholar and in El Salvador as a Fulbright Scholar.

Shannon Gleeson is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the chairperson of ILR’s Department of Global Labor and Work. She also serves as a teaching faculty member in Latina/o Studies and American Studies programs in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences and is a professor in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.

A sociologist who studies migrant worker rights and immigration policy, Professor Gleeson is engaged in various collaborative projects that examine immigrant workers. She is particularly interested in how worker rights policies are implemented on the ground as well as how workers, unions, worker centers and other NGOs navigate the policies that impact precarious workers, especially the 8 million U.S. workers who are undocumented.

Professor Gleeson has co-authored five books and monographs, including the book “Scaling Migrant Worker Rights: How Advocates Collaborate and Contest State Power,” which won the 2024 Best Book Award by the American Political Science Association Latino Caucus.

Professor Gleeson earned a Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley.

Patricia Campos-Medina is a senior extension faculty and the Executive Director of the Worker Institute at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. In that role, Dr. Campos-Medina leads research, policy innovation, and training to advance worker justice, collective bargaining rights, and the interests of workers in today’s economy and society.

Dr. Campos-Medina is a political scientist and policy expert on workplace and labor issues, women’s rights, voting rights, immigrant worker justice, and U.S. trade relations. She is also a member of the Diverse Solidarity Economies (DISE), a collective of Black and brown feminist scholars focused on research that decolonizes and diversifies the field of political economy.

An alumnus of the ILR School, Dr. Campos-Medina also holds a Master of Public Administration degree from the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University.

Dr. Campos-Medina’s dissertation research focused on the integration experience of Central American workers under temporary protective status (TPS), and she continues that research at ILR today.

Darlène Dubuisson is an Assistant Professor of Caribbean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, within the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies. Professor Dubuisson contributes to interdisciplinary conversations on migration, gender, and the Black diaspora across campus institutes and programs.

A sociocultural anthropologist, Professor Dubuisson’s research engages Black feminist theory, Black intellectual history, speculative fiction, apocalyptic anthropology, and migration and transnational studies. Her work examines how Black political thought, diasporic movements, and feminist praxis intersect to shape public life, with a focus on the lived experiences and imaginative horizons of Black communities across the Americas.

In 2022, Professor Dubuisson received a Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship to support the completion of her first book, “Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination,” which was published in December 2024 by Rutgers University Press. The book received the 2024 SLACA (Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology) Annual Book Prize.

Professor Dubuisson earned her Ph.D. in Applied and Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University.