Celeste Curington

Celeste Curington is an intersectional scholar with diverse research interests on the African Diaspora in the United States and Europe and other communities of color. In all of her research she examines the mechanisms through which intersectional oppression and inequalities around race, gender, class and citizenship are perpetuated, experienced and often resisted in various settings, such as the workplace and the dating market.

Curington’s forthcoming book, Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender and Care Work in Portugal, examines the everyday lives of an African descendant care service workforce in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic research in the greater metropolitan area of Lisbon,  Curington chronicles how African descendant care workers experience – and relentlessly resist – everyday experiences of systemic gendered anti-Black racism as they go about their days searching for work, interacting with patrons in public spaces, and negotiating workspace interactions with colleagues, clients and the families of those under their care. By tracing the historical construction of labor from the imperial period and how its vestiges remain firmly ensconced in a post-colonial global care economy,  Curington illustrates how deeply intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women “hyper-invisible” and “hyper-visible” as “appropriate” workers in Lisbon.

Her co-authored book, The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance (with Jennifer Hickes Lundquist and Ken-Hou Lin), is a comprehensive analysis of “digital-sexual racism,” a distinct form of gendered sexual racism that is mediated and amplified through the impersonal and anonymous context of online dating. Curington’s work has also appeared in several venues, including the Du Bois Review, contexts journal, Race and Social Problems, the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the journal of Symbolic Interaction, Sociological Spectrum, the American Sociological Review, among others. Curington is currently embarking on a new book project which will center on the intersection of BIPOC birth workers’ changing “workplace” experiences and community lives in and around Massachusetts, and within the context of nationwide reproductive injustice.

Curington’s work has been featured in a variety of media outlets including Variety Magazine, The Daily Show: Beyond the Scenes, Vice, Mashable, Insider, NBC LX, Maxima, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and Women’s Health.