Nikita Aggarwal, PhD Candidate, to Presented at 2026 Pacific Sociological Association Conference.
Nikita Aggarwal, PhD Candidate in Social Work, recently presented at the 97th Annual Pacific Sociological Association (PSA) Conference as part of the panel Community-Based Participatory Research: Collaboration through Community Partnerships. Her presentation, “Community-Engaged Research on Precarity and Coercion: South Asian Immigrant Workers in the U.S. Food Service Industry,” draws on her mixed-methods dissertation to examine how coercive labor practices-including wage theft, verbal abuse, and unsafe working conditions- intersect with immigration-related stressors to shape the mental health of South Asian immigrant restaurant workers in the U.S.
More broadly, the presentation underscores the value of community-engaged, participatory research approaches for accessing and understanding the lived experiences of hard-to-reach populations, contributing to interdisciplinary conversations on labor, migration, and structural inequality under conditions of precarity.