I am an organizer, teacher, and full-time troublemaker. In the spring of 2024, I decided to leave a nearly decade-long career in academia to work in the labor movement. Alongside graduate and undergraduate student workers as well as faculty in the Greater Boston area, I fight to reimagine and rebuild US higher education. As a queer AuDHDer, I am passionate about co-creating spaces that are less structurally disabling and more radically foregrounding of marginalized perspectives.
At SEIU Local 509, I co-facilitate our higher ed strike schools and organize in coalition with facilities workers, administrative staff, and student groups on university campuses. I’ve helped workers running a petition for the first time escalate to a strike in five months, negotiated and implemented first and successor contracts alike, and organized with workers across two states to free one of their union siblings from ICE detention. Previously, I walked a picket line across four semesters with the University and College Union’s Nottingham branch and caught a boss shoving a worker into a wall on video for the Teaching Assistants’ Association, AFT Local 3220. (Good times.)
In my academic life, I was an assistant professor in the School of Politics & International Relations at the University of Nottingham, a fellow with the Higher Education Academy, and a member of ISA–Northeast’s governing council. My academic research focused on white supremacy as a feature of national security institutions and counterterrorism as a tool of governance, and I was privileged to share my work in nine countries, with local community organizations throughout the US and UK, and in front of multiple national governments who realized too late that I was there to critique them. You can read some of my academic-ish writing on this page. I was most privileged to get to teach and mentor hundreds of students, and affirming for grad students that it is actually not okay that a professor talked to them like that continues to be my favorite part of my job.
I post frequently on Bluesky about social justice, leftist politics, and the daily rhythm of union work at @annameier.bsky.social.