GWSS PhD student Marielle Marcaida was honored this week as one of the 2025–2026 Graduate Labor Research Grant recipients at the annual UW Labor Studies Awards Celebration. As part of the event, Marcaida presented a research poster drawn from a chapter of her dissertation, It Takes a Village: The Human Rights Activism of Mothers Under the Philippine Drug War.
The Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies awards competitive grants of up to $5,000 to University of Washington graduate students pursuing innovative research on work, workers, and workers’ organizations. Supported projects contribute new knowledge to the interdisciplinary field of labor studies—examining themes such as class relations, the social conditions of work, labor processes, working-class culture and politics, the intersections of work with race, gender, and state power, and labor movements in both U.S. and global contexts.
Marcaida’s research explores the human rights activism of urban poor mothers in the Philippines, whose families have been directly impacted by former President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs.” Her work highlights the mothers’ grassroots campaigns for justice, their community-based support networks, and the collective strategies that have emerged in response to state-sanctioned violence. By centering the everyday labor of mourning, organizing, and care, Marcaida’s dissertation traces how these women resist stigma, build power, and reimagine the possibilities of justice within and beyond their neighborhoods.