Grayson Koyi

As a social science researcher, Grayson is keen to understand how workers challenge and change the social, economic and political environments that marginalize them, and how macro-level factors interact with micro-level factors to influence the effectiveness of workers’ transformative agency. This interest in workers’ transformative agency emerges from his research on how work is fashioned at the intersection of global economic processes with local labour markets and institutions, stratified by varying degrees of formality and informality, as well as gender, age and other social identities. He has investigated these dynamics in the context of developing economies, economic restructuring, labour market de-regulation and trade union responses more generally.Assuming that academia can make an important societal contribution, especially if the ways in which knowledge itself is produced embody alternatives to the status quo, he has increasingly conducted research on labour and employment issues, including wage regimes and living condition measures jointly with actors who have a direct stake in progressive social change, such as trade unions and civil society organisations.The geographical focus of his work has been east and southern Africa - Zambia, Malawi, Swaziland, Tanzania, and Uganda in particular