In this episode, Kelly chats with Ilana Gershon about unemployment and the post-pandemic workplace in the United States’ knowledge economy. Nearly five years after the publication of Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today, Gershon revisits the genesis of that project, reflects on the endurance of the neoliberal conception of the self, and shares that her post-pandemic project points toward a rethinking of the American social contract.
Ilana Gershon is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. Her research on neoliberalism and new media has been published in the discipline’s leading journals, including Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and American Ethnologist. She is also the author of the three monographs, including most recently, Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (2017).
Learn More & Subscribe
SEA’s podcast, Mergers and Acquisitions demonstrates how anthropological and other perspectives can enhance and complicate understandings of economic life and contemporary events. Mergers and Acquisitions hosts interviews with leading economic anthropologists, provides reflection pieces on economic transformations and problems, and serves as a vehicle for new and established scholars to connect with each other. Recognizing that the best ideas and insights are rarely generated alone, Mergers and Acquisitions offers a collective mind-hive for furthering the study of economic life.
