This new Q&A series highlights the work of the Humanities Council’s current Old Dominion Research Professors. The professorship provides additional research time for Princeton faculty members and seeks to enhance the University humanities community more broadly.
As a 2024-25 Old Dominion Research Professor in the Humanities Council, Paul Frymer (Politics) is conducting research on historical policy development of agricultural laborers in the United States. His research and teaching interests are broadly in American politics, political history, and public policy, engaging specifically in questions involving law, civil rights and race, labor and employment, political parties, and social movements.
Tell us why you chose your current research topic.
I’m working on a few different topics, all of which pertain to longstanding interests I’ve had at the intersection of labor, race, and the development of public policies intended to reduce inequality in the United States. But some of the specific concerns I’m working on have been influenced quite directly by our current political climate. (I study American politics, so how can they not?)
My interest in the development of public policy towards farmworkers in America, a group of workers that is heavily immigrant and with large numbers who are undocumented, is quite directly motivated by the fierce debates over immigration, race, and deportation. My interest in the rights of workers, particularly the more than 2/3rds of Americans who are classified as ‘at will’ employees without job security, is motivated both by looking for alternatives to the weakening of federal labor laws that focus more on unionization than employee rights, and by recent successful efforts of non-unionized workers in places like New York City and Philadelphia to make meaningful reforms to such laws. And my interests more broadly in the historical functioning of democracy in U.S. political institutions, with a particular focus on how expansive the term “democracy” is used by people in very different situations–some situations in which ‘democracy’ is invoked when the common eyeball test might suggest otherwise, and other situations which suggest more democracy than proffered by the conventional wisdom–obviously pertains to our current moment.
What do you hope that this research will add to your field?
I try to raise topics and concerns that are a bit outside the mainstream of my field; farmworkers and at-will workers do not receive extensive attention from political scientists, and I hope to not only illuminate the importance of these issues broadly for policy scholars but for the discipline of political science as well. On the question of democracy in the development of American politics, I initially hoped to make an attempt to provide some additional nuance and questioning of a topic at the center of our discipline – what constitutes democracy and democratic backsliding and how do we bolster the positives and defend against the negatives? Given the onslaught of the current administration to an array of democratic practices, the project both seems as important as ever but also makes me wonder whether now is not the time for ‘additional nuance’ to what increasingly appears to be a national emergency.
What’s one thing about your current project that you think would interest the public?
I’m trying to better understand our current political moment by illuminating features of American democracy that have been overlooked. For instance, farmers have historically been heavily reliant on laborers that have lacked democratic rights, going back to slavery and the Jim Crow South and extending to the reliance on non-citizen immigrant labor today.
But especially with the power of our current moment, I am looking to find how democracy can survive and even thrive in contexts that are full of inequalities of power, violence, and law. Labor policies are an important place for this because as critical every person’ ‘labor’ is to their lives and livelihood, the workplace has always been a place where ‘democracy’ has been contested and frequently ‘optional.’
Tell us about your year so far as an Old Dominion Research Professor.
I have really enjoyed hearing what my colleagues at the Humanities Council [and the Society of Fellows] are working on. The presentations at our seminars have been not just fascinating but, frankly, a bit intimidating due the amazing wealth of knowledge applied to serious and fundamental theoretical questions. The fact that I’ve heard from so many different disciplinary perspectives has opened me up to completely different approaches to understanding topics of common ground, forcing me to rethink many of my base assumptions and even my standard language of understanding on an almost weekly basis.
