Mergers & Acquisitions

Liz Fouksman is a Lecturer in Social Justice at the Centre for Public Policy Research in the School of Education, Communication, and Society at King’s College London. Her scholarship has appeared in various outlets, including Economy and Society, World Development, and Africa.

In this episode, Kelly catches up with Jong Bum Kwon and Carrie M. Lane about their landmark 2016 volume, Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and its Absence. Pulling together disparate threads of an emergent anthropological interest in unemployment, Kwon, Lane, and their contributors helped define a critical subfield in the wake of the global financial crisis. Revisiting the volume from the perspective of 2021 reveals a remarkably prescient book with questions and theoretical interventions that have only become more illuminative with time.

Jong Bum Kwon is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Webster University. His scholarship has appeared in various journals, including American Ethnologist and Critique of Anthropology, and he is the co-editor of Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and its Absence (Cornell University Press).

Carrie M. Lane is Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Her scholarship has appeared in various journals, including American Ethnologist and the Anthropology of Work Review. She is the author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment (Cornell University Press) and the co-editor of Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and its Absence (Cornell University Press).

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).

Dr Courtney Lewis is currently an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina – Columbia. A citizen of the Cherokee nation, Dr Lewis’ overall work is in economic development for Native Nations in the United States and, consequently, issues of sovereignty related to economic sustainability and stability. Her research areas include economic anthropology, Indigenous rights, economic justice, political economy, economic sovereignty, public anthropology, food and agricultural sovereignty, Native Nation economic development, American Indian studies, race and entrepreneurship, and economic colonialism. Dr Lewis is the author of ‘Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty’, published in 2019, which is based on her ethnographic work with indigenous small businesses. In Fall 2022, Dr Lewis is joining the Anthropology faculty at Duke University.

In this episode, Ipshita talks to Professors Walter Little and Lynne Milgram about their long-term research on social entrepreneurship. Walt’s work with indigenous peoples in Guatemala and Mexico and Lynne’s focus on women workers in Philippines lay the ground for a rich conversation and help rethink the globally standardized ideas on what constitutes social entrepreneurship. We also discuss the links between social entrepreneurship and ‘development’ and explore the ways in which ethnographic work and economic anthropology help scholars transcend static frameworks of analysis and gain a deeper sense of the distinctive needs, motivations and values that peoples and communities bring to entrepreneurial labor.

Walter E. Little is Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Albany, with a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He studies the social and political economies of Latin American indigenous peoples, particularly in Guatemala, Mexico, and in the Albany, NY region. His multi-sited ethnographic research combines political economy and interpretive perspectives in order to better understand the politics of identity, economic development, cultural heritage and tourism in urban places, and the everyday practices of handicrafts production and marketplace interactions. He is the author of numerous articles, books, and reviews, including Mayas in the Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization, and Cultural Identity (2004), which won Best Book of 2005 from the New England Council for Latin American Studies, and Street Economies in the Urban Global South (2013), coedited with Karen Tranberg Hansen and B. Lynne Milgram, which won the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize. Walt is also the author of Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics, co-edited with Cristina Panella (2021).

B. Lynne Milgram is Professor of Anthropology at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto. Her research on gender and development in the northern Philippines has analyzed the cultural politics of social change with regard to women’s work in microfinance, handicrafts, and in the Philippine-Hong Kong secondhand clothing trade. Milgram’s current SSHRC funded Philippine research investigates transformations of urban public space and issues of informality, extralegality, and social entrepreneurship with regard to street vending, public markets, and food provisioning systems. Additionally drawing on transnational trade network scholarship, recent projects also analyze the northern Philippines’ emergent specialty Arabica coffee industry and artisans’ use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to market their crafts. Milgram has published this research in refereed journal articles and book chapters and in five co-edited volumes, including Economics and Morality: Anthropological Approaches (2009, with Katherine E. Browne), and Street Economies in the Urban Global South (2013, with Karen Tranberg Hansen and Walter E. Little).

Stefanie Mauksch teaches Anthropology at Leipzig University, Germany. She has conducted research on the global social entrepreneurship movement, startup communities and the effects of entrepreneurial initiatives, preferably in the Global South. Her research is largely focused on how entrepreneurship shapes local action in contexts of development, in particular Nepal and Sudan, and in specific social fields, such as meanings and experiences of dis/ability. She publishes her work in both disciplines of Anthropology and Organization Studies.

To read more about Dr. Waqas Butt and his work, please visit his faculty page: https://www.anthropology.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/waqas-butt

To learn more about Elana’s work, please visit her website: elanaresnick.com