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 family's 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. Upon his return, with a body full of shrapnel, trauma, and opioids, 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, as a single mom, worked three jobs, one of which was at the police credit union in San Francisco. There, my Dad found a community that convinced him that becoming a cop was a path forward that would get him out of the socioeconomic hole he had been born into. Now, in his late 60’s his body is riddled with injuries that he sustained on the job, and he struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder from the things he was forced to see to give his kids a shot at a comfortable life.

It was that question — about social mobility, our bodies and the labor systems that use them up — that became the engine of my research.

When Amazon warehouses began filling up farm towns in the agricultural towns I worked in, I decided to apply to the University of North Carolina to see if I could study these transitions. Over the last four years I engaged in a long term ethnography of the Amazon workplace and 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 as a disabled person 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.