The anthropology of work
If anthropology is the study of what people do (practice) and why they do it (meaning), then the anthropology of work is the study of the practices and meaning-making that create our shared world of work.
When you consider the minutia of what makes a job or what constitutes a career, you realize how very weird work truly is. This page - like my career - is devoted to the weirdness of working lives, working institutions, and working philosophies.
current research
Departures
Layoff culture and the afterlife of working relationships
Are layoffs inevitable? Is there such a thing as a “good layoff?” Do the relationships we form to work ever truly die?
Layoffs are an unfortunate phenomenon of the times. Mass terminations have indelibly marked the post-Covid world of work, from the high-profile layoffs of big tech companies to the more subtle yet no less traumatic layoffs of small firms and local institutions. For contemporary employees, being laid off is less a matter of “if” and more of “when.”
In the US, layoffs are often characterized as the cost of doing business, the natural consequence of survival in a free capitalist market where people and the labor they produce are just another commodity. Layoffs are rationalized as strategic, even necessary. They are the inescapable shadow of American growth culture.
In this project, I aim to explore the real human cost of layoff culture by recording the voices of those directly impacted. Too often, these stories are drowned out by the scale and volatility of mass terminations: the shock of numbers (40,000 workers!), the company's market profile, or the callous behavior of the executives—there and gone in a news cycle. It is this rapid, repeated happening, reacting, and forgetting that makes the radical trauma of layoffs seem natural.
By collecting and sharing the perspectives of the terminated, I will underscore how unnatural layoffs actually are.
If you would be interested in participating in this project and sharing your story, please get in touch with me here:
