Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series—Dr. Apostolidis’s scholarly research bridges political theory, cultural studies, and the analysis of social movements. His work investigates immigration and labor in the United States and focuses primarily on undocumented Latino day laborers, meatpacking workers, and the worker center movement. 

He is currently studying political orientations and working conditions among Latin American migrant day laborers in US cities. This project is based on collaborative research with the CASA Latina (Seattle) and VOZ (Portland) workers' centers and looks at what can be learned about the current global crisis of capitalism and the prospects for opposing neoliberalism by viewing the crisis from the vantage point of day laborers. Professor Apostolidis has published widely on critical social theory, immigrant workers, feminist theory, democratic theory, and the Christian Right. His most recent book, Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America About Democracy,, explores how immigrant workers’ stories about their life experiences yield novel conceptions of racial and class domination and enable opposition to these power-formations.

This lecture is sponsored by the Center for Research on Families’ Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series. The Center for Research on Families (CRF) is an endowed interdisciplinary research center in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series brings internationally recognized speakers with expertise in family research to campus each year. The lecture series began in 1999 through an endowment established in memory of Tay Gavin Erickson.