Cedric de Leon has spent three decades moving between the picket line and the lecture hall—organizing workers, then explaining to the rest of us why their fight matters more than ever.
Professor of Sociology & Labor Studies, UMass Amherst | Former Director, UMass Amherst Labor Center
Cedric is a sociologist, author, professor, and one of the country's leading voices on race, labor, and party politics.
He is Professor of Sociology and Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches courses on Artificial Intelligence, Organizing, Labor History, Social Theory, and Political Sociology. His classes and trainings are discussion-oriented and based on the principles of democratic pedagogy and popular education. He urges his students to participate in their education and encourages them to imagine and build a better world.
From 2018 to 2022 he directed the UMass Amherst Labor Center, the nation's premier worker-side graduate program in Labor Studies, becoming the first person of color to hold the role.
He regularly speaks at union halls, union conventions, community gatherings, and academic and labor conferences on the role of organized labor, and specifically women workers and workers of color, in resisting authoritarianism and building a democracy worth fighting for.
Organizer
Scholar
Professor
Author
Speaker
From Organizer to Scholar
Before he was an academic, he was an organizer. From 1994 to 2006, de Leon worked as an organizer, researcher, and elected leader inside the U.S. labor movement, including the Service Employees International Union, the United Farm Workers, and the American Federation of Teachers. That decade on the ground shapes everything he's written since: his scholarship doesn't just analyze workers' movements from a distance, it argues from inside them.
The Political Articulation Framework
De Leon is best known for developing the framework of political articulation—the argument that political parties don't simply reflect the interests of voters, but actively construct the social divisions and coalitions they then claim to represent. It's a reframing that has influenced how scholars and organizers alike think about polarization, party realignment, and the fight for democracy itself.
Cedric is a frequent commentator for national media, having been interviewed by
