As a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Hailey’s research examines how cultural norms come to function as social technologies that organize human behavior, shape perception, and sustain economic systems through time.

Situated at the intersection of labor history, media studies, and cultural theory she uses oral history, dialogue, and cultural analysis to investigate how labor appears—or is rendered invisible—within social practice, symbolic representation, and institutional life. Centered on the U.S. South, her dissertation combines oral history and theoretical inquiry to examine how “Southern hospitality” operates as an embodied moral framework capable of organizing social and economic relations. Rather than treating hospitality as a personality trait, she approaches it as a social choreography through which connection is produced and exploitation is obscured. Through this lens, she studies how care, deference, and appearance can stabilize unequal labor relations while maintaining the perception of a coherent moral order.

Empirically, Hailey’s research draws on oral histories with workers in the food service and automotive industries to understand how certain places become culturally significant sites of Southern life. These narratives are complemented by analyses of media representations, historical texts, and material artifacts that shape public understandings of labor, value, and responsibility. Together, these materials illuminate how labor is not only performed but interpreted—how its meaning is constructed through systems of recognition, perception, and narrative.

Her work is informed by scholars such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Ruth Cowan Schwartz, whose work provides a foundation for understanding the material, political, and existential dimensions of human activity. She extends these frameworks by examining how such categories are lived and negotiated within contemporary economic conditions, particularly in regions where the historical legacies of racial capitalism and gendered labor exploitation remain deeply embedded.

Across her research, Hailey is particularly interested in how laboring bodies are interpreted and evaluated within institutional systems of value. She studies how appearance, comportment, and affect become criteria through which belonging, credibility, and worth are assigned. This focus reflects a broader concern with the relationship between material conditions and cultural meaning: specifically, how systems of production rely not only upon physical labor, but also upon the interpretive practices that make those systems appear natural, inevitable, or morally justified.

Ultimately, Hailey’s work aims to bridge academic research, embodied experience, and public discourse. By combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with accessible narrative forms, she contributes to broader understandings of labor as a lived, relational, and culturally mediated condition. Her work seeks to open new possibilities for how labor, value, and responsibility might be understood in the future.