Harleen Kaur Bal

HARLEEN BAL, then a graduate student at University of California, Davis, California, was approved funding in April 2024 to aid research on “Contestations of Quotidian Work-Life among California’s Punjabi Working Families within Contemporary U.S. Capitalism,” supervised by Dr. James Howard Smith. The work carried out during this phase of dissertation research was comprised of mixed methods, including interviews, participant observation, and media analysis that spanned sixteen months within California’s Sacramento Valley between July 2024 and July 2025. This ethnographic fieldwork took place in mundane contexts with many individuals, but primarily, three central Punjabi diaspora families embedded within California’s food supply chain through trucking, restaurant work, and farming. The grantee’s involvement with a grassroots organization was integral to this phase of data collection. Research spanned workplaces, such as a fast-food restaurant, truck-yards, and farms, as well as domestic spheres — homes, family gatherings, and broader community events and religious life. Over this period, the grantee built rapport with key interlocutors and examined the complexities of kinship, everyday tasks, and labor networks. Key events from the fieldwork included the annual Nagar Kirtan in Yuba City and participation in a multi-day march in October (2024). This multi-media approach allowed the research to incorporate various sensory “notes” to accompany written and recorded fieldnotes and collected literature. The key findings focused on food practices and how California’s Punjabi diaspora conceives of labor, and what this tells us about the logics of U.S. contemporary capitalism.