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).
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