Amazon

For the past four years, I have lived and worked in the Durham/Raleigh areas of North Carolina, navigating the space between the university and the industrial warehouse. As a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UNC Chapel Hill, my research examines the evolution of labor in the New South—specifically the history of a Garner, NC Amazon warehouse built on the ruins of a former Slim Jim factory. It was my families history in Appalachia that brought me back to the South. My Grandpa was born poor at the furthest tip of Western North Carolina in a town called murphy. With an abusive step-dad, and no opportunity, he signed up for the military and headed to Korea for two tours in a battle for the future of Capitalism. Upon his return, with a body full of shrapnel, trauma and opiods, he met and married my grandma while on the GI Bill in San Francisco. When my Dad was two, he left and never returned, starting his third family-one came before my Grandma. My Grandma, a single mom worked at the Police Credit Union in San Francisco. It was there that my Dad was drawn into a trade that left him with PTSD and my brothers and I battling with the idea-who was it who hurt us? The imaginary criminals we were told to fear, or the very state that said it would take care of our family if we signed up in service of that very nation.

It was that question — about bodies, labor, and the institutions we are told to trust — that became the engine of my research.

When Amazon warehouses began filling up farm towns and irretrievably changing the nature of these towns, I decided to apply to the University of North Carolina to see if I could study these transitions. To understand this transition, I engaged in four years of covert ethnography and union organizing within Amazon’s distribution network. I have worked the warehouse floor picking and packing packages, organized alongside my peers, and documented the physical and social toll of trying to make a living in the South on an Amazon wage. Throughout this time, I have worked tirelessly to understand how the body is consumed by work and to help build worker power in the worst state for workers in the U.S., according to Oxfam. Below are examples of the Videography work I have done that will be a part of a long-form documentary, the social media page for the Union that I manage, and a newsletter I managed and helped design with a team of workers to educate our warehouses on unionization