Rachel Meyer
Rachel Meyer is a Lecturer on Sociology and Pre-Concentration Academic Advisor at Harvard University. Her areas of interest include work and labor, social class, political sociology, cultural sociology, social change, social movements, labor movements, globalization, U.S. labor history, and qualitative methods.
Meyer received a B.A. in Anthropology and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. Previous positions in Harvard’s Department of Sociology include Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies and Harvard College Fellow. She has been a Head Preceptor in Expository Writing and has taught in Harvard Extension School. She has extensive experience with academic advising including advising student research and theses.
Meyer’s research explores the relationship between political economy and working-class mobilization. She is interested in precarious workers, neoliberalism, and social change. Her focus is on how collective action experiences transform working-class consciousness and subjectivity with attention to organizing trends in the American labor movement, including living wage campaigns. She has published on 1) precarious workers’ subjectivity; 2) working-class mobilizations targeting the state; 3) the subjective consequences of local political mobilization; 4) events and the subjective consequences of collective action, using a historical sociological perspective (with Howard Kimeldorf); and 5) the grassroots political mobilization of immigrants in the U.S. (with Janice Fine). She has also published on the extent and sources of ethical consumption with respect to sweatshops and workers’ rights with colleagues at the University of Michigan. Meyer's current projects are on 'flexible' labor and on the relationship between workplace and community in the mid-20th century American labor movement.
Meyer has received awards for her papers from both the Labor and Labor and Labor Movements Section and the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association, and for Best Graduate Student Paper at the University of Michigan. She has received multiple teaching awards including being voted a Favorite Professor by the Harvard College Class of 2022.