Stanford Humanities Center
jem Jebbia is a PhD candidate in religious studies at Stanford University. In her research, jem focuses on race and immigration, interfaith communities, and material religion in California. At Stanford, jem has taught courses in early Christianity, religion and material culture, Asian American religions, and ethics and activism.
SHC Project
The Fruits of Their Labor: Religion, Labor, and Social Justice in California’s Central Valley, 1870-1960
Jebbia's dissertation project explores interreligious labor movements in contemporary California’s Central Valley. This research considers why and how, after arriving in this region, immigrants, Indigenous, and Black laborers contested white supremacy while living in racial, religious, and national hierarchies that maintained it. Each of the four chapters in the dissertation presents a case study of a community or communities that catalyzed social change through the founding of new religious sites, participation in social movements, and the use of religion to resist white supremacist systems and powers. The project emphasizes how the study of religion in the American West is embedded in race, ethnicity, gender, class, physical landscape, and regional identity, and how religion both upholds white supremacy in a particular place and time and provides modes of resisting it. At the same time, the study of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and regional identity in the American West is embedded in religion—which scholars of the region often overlook.
