Department of Anthropology

Geographical areas of specialization
United States; Oceania - Samoa

Research Interests
employment; new media; work; breakups; neoliberalism

Ilana Gershon has two major questions she has been exploring this past decade. She explores how people engage with neoliberalism as a quixotic task of translation -- turning a theoretical armature produced by Hayek, Friedman, and others in the Mont Pelerin circle -- into a set of guidelines for the practical quandaries of daily life. This question motivated her recent book on hiring in contemporary corporate America, Down and Out in the New Economy. She also wants to know how new media affects highly charged social tasks, such as breaking up in the United States. She has written about how people use new media to end romantic relationships in her book The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Her current research addresses how the pandemic affects people’s experiences of their implicit social contracts in the contemporary US workplace.

She has edited three volumes of ethnographic fiction on work, animals, and monsters. She has also published No Family Is an Island: Cultural Expertise among Samoans in Diaspora, and edited special issues on topics ranging from ignorance, reflexivity, media ideologies, to the “newness” of new media. She has been a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study. Her intellectual interests range from linguistic anthropology, science studies, media studies, legal anthropology, anthropology of democracy, and anthropology of work.