Biju Mathew
Advisor
Biju Mathew is a co-founder and volunteer organizer with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a grassroots mass-based organization of immigrant taxi drivers in New York City. His recent book “Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City (Cornell University Press, 2008) bridges the worlds of the academy and labor organizing, of theory and practice, by skillfully combining contemporary social theory with ethnography based in political work. Robin D. G. Kelly (Professor of history and American studies, USC) has called the book a “brilliant” commentary that “combin[es] memoir, ethnography, history, social critique, and political analysis” while the Financial Times of London lauds it for being an “engaging narrative” that “gives humanity to the person on the other side of the glass.” Beyond the question of immigrant labor, Mathew’s work extends to such themes as software labor markets and Hindu nationalism in the diaspora and has been published in a range of academic journals such as Globalization, Education and Society, and Rethinking Marxism. His seminal article on Hindu nationalism with Vijay Prashad – “The Protean Forms of Yankee Hindutva”– appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Biju Mathew is also a member of the board of the Brecht Forum (The New York Marxist School), co-host of a weekly radio show on WBAI NYC – “Global Movements/Urban Struggles”– and a co-founder of the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, The South Asian Solidarity Initiative (SASI) and the Forum of Inquilabi Leftists (FOIL). Dr. Mathew received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 1993 and is currently an Associate Professor of Business at Rider University, New Jersey, and lives in New York City.
