Manuel Rosaldo

Manuel coordinates several initiatives that support Stanford graduate students in carrying out community-engaged research, teaching, and service. He divides his time between supporting programs at the Haas Center—including the Graduate Public Service Fellowship, the Graduate Community Engaged Teaching Fellowship, and the Research as Praxis Workshop Series—and the Research, Action, and Impact through Strategic Engagement (RAISE) Fellowship in VPGE. As a teacher, mentor, and administrator, Manuel seeks to create spaces for graduate students to collectively cultivate skills, commitments, and identities as community-engaged scholars.

Previously, Manuel spent four years as an Assistant Professor of Labor Relations and Sociology at Penn State University, where he was affiliated with the Center for Global Workers’ Rights, Latina/o Studies, and Latin American Studies. He holds a PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley, where his dissertation analyzed waste pickers’ struggles for workers’ rights and environmental justice in Brazil and Colombia. This research led to six peer-reviewed publications, garnering four awards from the American Sociological Association. He was awarded UC Berkeley’s Public Sociology Prize in recognition of his collaborations with waste picker organizations, involving research, trainings, op-eds, graffiti artivism, and political advocacy.

Manuel holds a master’s degree in Global Affairs from New York University, where he wrote a thesis on the debate over the commercialization of microfinance based on field research in southern Mexico. His undergraduate thesis at Wesleyan University explored binational family relations between immigrant janitors in Connecticut and the families that they left behind in Mexico, Peru, and Chile. He has worked as an organizer and researcher for the UNITE HERE! and SEIU labor unions, an editor for a social innovation news organization, and a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State’s Center for Global Workers’ Rights. Outside the office, Manuel enjoys goofing around with his two young kids, cultural events, community organizing, travel, and hip hop.