United States

Heidi Gottfried received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1987. Her research interests span areas, ranging from sociology of work, the care economy, sociology of gender, welfare state, feminist theory, labor movements, to comparative political economy. She has co-edited numerous special issues and books on gender, work, and the economy, including the Handbook on the Sociology of Work and Employment (Sage, 2015), Gendering the Knowledge Economy: Comparative Perspectives (2007), and Care Work in Transition: Transnational Circuits of Gender, Migration and Care (2018), a special issue of Critical Sociology (with Jennifer Jihye Chun). Her monograph Gender, Work and Economy: Unpacking the Global Economy (Polity Press, 2013) chronicles the changing patterns of gender and work across industrialized countries, old and emerging global cities, both in the global North and South. Generous research support from the Social Science Research Council-Abe Fellowship and the Center for Global Partnership of The Japan Foundation culminated in her monograph, The Reproductive Bargain: Deciphering the Enigma of Japanese Capitalism (Brill, 2015). Partnering with Anne Zacharias-Walsh and Kazuko Tanaka, she developed a two-year grassroots exchange program that produced bi-lateral solidarity networks among Japanese working women’s organizations and their counterparts in the US.

Her published articles and chapters have appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Employment Relations, Social Theory at Work, Sociology, The British Journal of Sociology, and Work, Employment and Society. She has received numerous research grants, presented her research world-wide, and held a variety of guest professorships at the Institute of Social Theory and Dynamics, Hiroshima; International Christian University, Tokyo; Hamburg University; In-East, Uni-Duisburg-Essen; Maria Jahoda Feminist Guest Professor, University of Bochum; Ochanomizu University, Tokyo; Shanghai University, the Australia National University; the Swedish Institute for Work Life Research; and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung. As a founding member and co-convener of the international feminist working group on Gender, Globalization and Work Transformation (GLOW), she fostered a network of scholars publishing several monographs, special journal issues, and books on comparative care work, gender regimes and welfare states. Most recently, she guest edited with Sylvia Walby and Karen Shire a special issue on “The future of Gender Regimes” forthcoming in the Women’s Studies International Forum.

She recently published, Global Labor Migration: New Directions, co-edited with Eileen Boris, Julie Greene and Joo-Cheong Tham. The book advances the study of labor migration not only through multidisciplinary perspectives but also through a more expansive field of study. Despite a proliferation of interest in migration studies, much of the literature and debates are confined to disciplinary silos or focus on a single sector (e.g., care, agriculture, construction). By thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries, with sociologists, legal scholars, and historians as contributors, the chapters simultaneously reflect on the contemporary nature of labor migration as well as its historical roots.