Rate My Professor Steve McKay

Steve McKay is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, within the Social Sciences Division. He serves as Faculty Director of the Center for Labor and Community. McKay received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001, an M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies with Distinction from the same university in 1996, and a B.A. in Political Economy of Industrial Societies with Honors from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. His research interests encompass labor and labor markets, political sociology, globalization and social change, migration and racial formation, Southeast Asia, and community-engaged research. McKay's work examines global labor dynamics, including high-tech production in the Philippines, Filipino seafarers' masculinities, and local issues in Santa Cruz County through collaborative projects.

McKay authored Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands?: The Politics of High-Tech Production in the Philippines, published by Cornell University/ILR Press in 2006. He co-edited Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2021) and New Routes for Diaspora Studies (Indiana University Press, 2012). Notable peer-reviewed publications include “Navigating Race: Intersectional Boundary-Making onboard Multi-national Ships” in Ethnic and Racial Studies (2021), “Community-Initiated Student-Engaged Research: Expanding Undergraduate Teaching and Learning through Public Sociology” in Teaching Sociology (2019, with M. Greenberg and R. London), “The Vitality of Students for Public Sociology” in Contexts: Sociology for the Public (2019, with M. Greenberg and R. London), “Filipino Sea Men: Constructing Masculinities in an Ethnic Labour Niche” in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2007), and recent articles such as “Building a Community Archive: Preserving and Uplifting Stories of Filipino Labor and Migration” (Filipino American National Historical Society Journal, 2023) and “Belonging and Its Barriers: A Critical Perspective of Latiné and Mixed-Status Families’ Experiences” (Social Sciences, 2023). He directs community-initiated student-engaged research initiatives including Watsonville is in the Heart, a community archive on Filipino labor; We Belong, on immigrant justice; Working for Dignity, the Santa Cruz Low-Wage Worker Study; and No Place Like Home, addressing the affordable housing crisis.