Jessie Lauren Stein
Doctoral Lecturer, Urban Studies
Email: jstein1@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Jessie L. Stein’s (PhD CUNY Graduate Center, 2025) research focuses on migration, labor, social reproduction, welfare states, feminist geography, and the politics of urban life. Her work examines how migrants are recruited to sustain public systems and urban infrastructures while being denied secure access to the social goods they help produce. Her current research investigates migrant essential workers’ struggles for permanent status in pandemic-era Quebec, asking how immigration policy operates as an instrument of the late-neoliberal welfare state and how migrants are scapegoated for crises in housing, healthcare, education, and other systems shaped by austerity and disinvestment.
Stein has published on immigration federalism, cultural politics, social movements, and urban cultural infrastructure. Her co-authored article “‘Guardian Angels’: Essential Work, Conjunctural Crises, and Shifting Sovereignty in COVID Quebec” appears in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. She is also co-authoring work on housing, migration, and blame in neoliberal Canada, and has written for public audiences in The Breach on how migrants are blamed for the housing crisis while remaining central to the production and maintenance of urban life.
As a researcher and teacher, Stein is committed to accessible, engaged scholarship that connects critical theory to public debates, social movements, and students’ lived experiences. She has worked closely with the community organizations, especially the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, where she serves as a board member, and her research is shaped by long-term commitments to migrant justice, community-engaged methods, and feminist approaches to knowledge production.
At Queens College, Stein teaches courses in Urban Studies including Urban Poverty and Affluence, Urban Diversity, Sex and the City, and the Master’s Thesis Writing Workshop. Her teaching focuses on urban inequality, social reproduction, and struggles over space, belonging, and collective life.