Neoliberalism gets under our skin, shaping how we think, feel and experience our worlds. My core research agenda takes this insight as a starting point and uses qualitative methods to understand how economic risk and uncertainty – endemic of the increasingly financialized and globally dispersed structure of paid work – permeate and shape people’s subjectivities, gendered practices, and social relationships in the institutions of work and family. 

I have two related ongoing strands of research:

1. Redundancies (job loss) in journalism: Why do workers consent to their own exploitation? While this question has been core to social science research on labour processes, prior research has narrowly conceptualised exploitation as overwork. To better capture salient workplace shifts of recent decades, we need to integrate a concept of how trends of employment insecurity are key to contemporary forms of labour exploitation. I identify journalism as an appropriate sector in which to study exploitation as conceptualised as employment insecurity. In this research project, I draw on interviews with U.K-based journalists who have experienced a recent job loss, as well follow-up interviews with approximately half the sample to answer this important question that cuts across social science disciplines.

2. The Connective Labour of Career Coaches: Biases in the hiring process are attributed to hiring managers’ concerns with “chemistry” and “fit.” Hiring managers are not the only, or even the most important, group of people in shaping hiring processes in upper echelons of work. An overlooked group are LMIs, such as career coaches and recruiters, who curate which candidates are placed in front of hiring managers (often a proxy for employers) in the first place. In this project, I contribute to social science expertise by clarifying how LMIs match unemployed job-seekers to jobs.