Jaylexia Clark is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and a 2023 Labor Research Action Network Emerging Scholar. She received her B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University (2019). In 2021, she defended her master’s thesis entitled, “Structuring Gig Work: An Investigation of the Relationship between Racial Residential Segregation and Labor Participation in the Gig Economy within U.S. counties between 2010-2018.” Her primary research interests are structural racial and gender inequality, AI inequality, platform technology, digital entrepreneurship, and labor.
 
As a 2022-2023 Fulbright recipient, she investigated the experiences of Black female digital entrepreneurs and platform workers in Accra, Ghana. Through a gendered racial capitalism analytical framework, she explored whether and to what extent gender and income inequality impact women's participation in Ghana's platform economy. This work was phase one of Clark’s three-project dissertation thesis titled “Racing Towards Global Racial Capitalism: An Investigation of How Racial and Gender Inequality is Reproduced in the Platform and Gig Economy,” wherein she seeks to bridge the gap between theories on gendered racial capitalism, platform technology, and the digital economy.

Jaylexia’s research has been supported by the Labor Research Action Network and the Institute of International Education. She has also received support from various programs and institutions at the University of Notre Dame, including the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Initiative on Race and Resilience, the Graduate Student Union, and the Multicultural Student Programs and Services.