The Pandemic Workplace: Tocqueville Revisited with Ilana Gershon

Please join the Center for Global Ethnography for “The Pandemic Workplace: Tocqueville Revisited,” a talk by Ilana Gershon, (Ruth N. Halls Professor, Anthropology, Indiana University Bloomington).

Friday, February 11th 2022
3:30PM to 5:00PM (PST)
On Zoom

☞ RSVP HERE.

Please note that Dr. Gershon’s talk and Q&A will be of special interest to anyone interested in incorporating ethnography into their methodological repertoire–from law, business, medicine, and engineering–and to ethnographers in the social sciences and humanities conducting fieldwork in professional settings.

Here is what Dr. Gershon says about the talk: 

Beginning from the assumption that the US workplace has become a key site in which Americans develop their political imagination of what it means to be a democratic citizen, in this talk I explore what the pandemic has revealed about how the workplace functions as site of private government. In describing the workplace as a site of private government, I draw inspiration from Elizabeth Anderson, who defines private government as an organization in which people are subject to rules that they don’t have some voice in creating and maintaining or lack access to representatives who craft and revise these rules. I address the complexities of learning fundamental lessons about governing through how today’s workplaces organize control, authority, and decision-making. In the context of the pandemic, many Americans began to interpret workplace interactions through classic social contract theory, returning to foundational questions about the sacrifices asked of individuals for the common good, and what democratic participation should look like in deliberative decision-making processes. This talk is based on over 200 oral histories with US workers, the majority of whom had to work in person during the pandemic, oral histories all gathered in 2020 by Zoom or phone. I ultimately argue that what the pandemic and our current political climate reveals is an urgent need to see contemporary American workplaces as laboratories of different approaches to democratic practices that can demonstrate (or fail to demonstrate) to American workers the value and effectiveness of participating in a deliberative democracy.

For any questions about the event, please contact David Stentiford, ds1 [at] stanford.edu (ds1[at]stanford[dot]edu).