On Sunday, April 27, 2025 at 4:00 p.m., Francisca Oyogoa, Assistant Professor in Sociology and African American Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, will conclude the 18th Season of the Distinguished Lecture Series with a discussion of “Race and Gender Inequality in Service Work on Trains, Airplanes, and Cruise Ships.”
Using firm-level data from railroad, airline, and cruise ship companies, the central questions addressed in this talk are: Why and how were race-gender hierarchies created, maintained, and legitimized on trains, airplanes, and cruise ships? The author focuses on employers’ role in producing inequality among workers by examining management’s actions and their own expressed race-gender ideology regarding service workers in the Pullman Railroad Company (1860s to 1960s), the four major U.S. airlines (1930s to 1970s), and U.S.-owned cruise companies (1970s to 2000s).
About our speaker: Francisca Oyogoa, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in Sociology and African-American Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, MA. She graduated from Bowdoin College (BA) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (PhD). Her teaching and research interests include labor, class, gender, globalization, race and ethnic studies, and migration. Dr. Oyogoa is the author of “Servants on the Move: Employers’ Race-Gender Ideology and Service Work on Trains, Planes, and Cruise Ships” (Lexington, 2024). Her current research project focuses on race, gender, and the North American expat experience in Latin America.
The Distinguished Lecture Series is organized and hosted by Dr. Jeremy Yudkin. Dr. Yudkin is a resident of the Berkshires and Professor of Music and Co-Director of the Center for Beethoven Research at Boston University. Every summer he presents the Lenox Library’s pre-concert lectures for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood season.