Professor of Anthropology
Indiana University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ilana Gershon is the Ruth N. Hall Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Gershon’s current research addresses how Americans use typological stereotypic categories such as generation or Meyer-Briggs types in the contemporary US workplace. Her latest monograph examines how neoliberal logics shape hiring in the United States, titled Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (2017). She has an edited volume, A World of Work: Imagined Manuals for Real Jobs, a collection of imagined job manuals for real jobs around the world, written for people who want to know how to be a professional wrestler in Mexico or a professional magician in Paris. In general, she is interested in how using new media affects highly charged social tasks, such as breaking up or hiring, and has also published The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media (2010).

She has also published a book comparing Pacific migrants’ experiences of social mobility in the United States and New Zealand in the book No Family Is an Island: Cultural Expertise among Samoans in Diaspora. Her intellectual interests range from linguistic anthropology, science studies, media studies, legal anthropology, anthropology of democracy, and anthropology of work.

Read more about Gershon’s expertise and her work as a researcher on her faculty page and on her Indiana University’s academia profile.

#employment #newmedia #work #neoliberalism