Towards Liberatory Research: A Conversation with Adriana Paz Ramírez

By Da In Choi, Coordinator, Thinking Gender 2025 Conference

The first time I met Adriana Paz Ramírez was in the winter of 2022, when she delivered a guest lecture on domestic workers’ leadership in labor organizing. Although she was on Zoom, her passion filled the large lecture hall. As an organizer who has dedicated her life to the labor rights of farmworkers and domestic workers, she said she believed in the power that came from the margins. Farmworkers and domestic workers had been excluded from the 1932 Fair Labor Standards Act and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Histories of slavery shaped the dominant understanding of what was considered meaningful work and who was included in labor laws. For a long time, even unions considered domestic workers to be “unorganizable” because households do not receive recognition as workplaces and domestic workers are dispersed across households. As Adriana highlighted in her lecture, it was precisely the workers who faced—and continue to grapple with—some of the harshest labor conditions and exclusions who had also been at the forefront of labor movements.

Meeting Adriana was inspiring for me because of my research and personal background. My research centers the stories produced by singmo (domestic servants) in South Korea to understand what they tell us about the meaning of labor and value during the times of compressed industrialization. My grandma and aunts shared their stories of post-Korean War industrialization when they struggled with poverty. Like many other rural young women, my aunts migrated to Seoul, taking care of their brothers so that they could get an education. While supporting their brothers’ education, my aunts worked at factories with long hours and unsafe work conditions. All but two of their elementary school friends became singmo, a highly stigmatized term referring to young women who were live-in maids in industrializing cities, often working for little to no pay and receiving dehumanizing treatment. Despite the stigma against singmo and factory workers as poor, ignorant girls, my aunts and their friends felt pride in providing others with education even when they themselves were denied opportunities to attain higher education. Former singmo enabled people around them—from biological to families of employment—to live, work, and achieve social mobility. Countering societal prejudices against poor working women, my aunts and their friends believed in the value of their labor and its contributions to people around them.

Adriana centers the knowledge produced by workers. As she said, domestic workers are not passive recipients of rights but creators of knowledge. Because of their labor experiences, domestic workers articulated the consequences of patriarchy and colonialism, and began grassroots movements that challenged imperial and capitalist ideas about labor value. Adriana traced the beginning of her organizing to her experience as a migrant farmworker in Canada. She immigrated to Canada through marriage but did not have a study or work permit. The easiest job to find for migrants was farm work; the majority of workers were from the Philippines and Mexico. Work conditions were terrible with rampant racism. Workers could not even go to the bathroom and frequently became ill from pesticides. Experiencing unjust and terrible work conditions first-hand, Adriana organized with other Latinx workers. She co-founded the Justicia for Migrant Workers, which continues to be a major organizing force across Canada today.

After getting fired from her job because of organizing, Adriana moved to Mexico and began organizing with maquiladora workers. This was where she connected with domestic workers and joined the International Domestic Workers’ Federation (IDWF). Organizing with domestic workers, mostly women of color and migrant workers, taught her more than anything about the urgency of adopting an intersectional framework. Unequal international development, with its origin in colonialism, patriarchy, and imperialism, continued to shape what was considered valuable work and how migrant workers of color were treated in workplaces. Through mentorship and horizontal support, workers fought back through storytelling. They shared stories of their labor, illuminating how families around the world – from direct kin, friends, and families of employment – depended upon them for survival and social mobility. The passing of Convention 189 at the International Labor Organization (ILO) in 2011, the first global legislation of its kind that codifies minimum wage and protection against overwork and health violations, is a testimony to how domestic workers produced knowledge through storytelling. By sharing their experiences with others, domestic workers advocated for the recognition of their dignity and the value of their labor.

To pass Convention 189, a cross-coalition between domestic workers and organizations at local, regional, and international levels was crucial. Adriana’s own career shows the value of a cross-coalitional approach towards labor justice. She has worked closely with labor scholars to think about the meaning of social change and knowledge production. Academic spaces and labor organizing are intertwined; in advocating for justice, knowledge production is not just an abstract matter, but a tangible mode of transformation.

Despite the historic wins by domestic workers worldwide to pass legislation to protect their labor rights, enforcement continues to be a problem. In 2021, Adriana won an Open Society Foundation Fellowship to study how workers can ensure that the laws that were introduced to protect them can be implemented on the ground. Domestic workers worldwide are still fighting for Convention 189 to be adapted in different countries around the world including the US, with South America taking the lead.

As coordinator for the 2025 Thinking Gender conference, I am excited that Adriana will be the keynote speaker because she asks fundamental questions about the stakes of research. Historically, research has been used for extraction, with workers in the Global South serving as “informants,” while academics in the Global North take credit for producing knowledge. However, by recognizing that workers have been challenging the ways in which colonial regimes and histories shape the system of knowledge production, research can also be utilized for liberation. Stories and experiences transform us and shape the stakes of our research. In anticipation of the upcoming conference, Adriana leaves the following questions for students who are interested in liberatory knowledge production to consider: “What is the stake of your research? For whose sake are you thinking and writing?”

I hope you will join us to hear more about this topic at the 2025 Thinking Gender Conference on March 7, 2025!

Register here.