Pugh

Allison Pugh is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Her research and teaching focus on how economic trends – from commodification to job insecurity to automation – shape the way people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at home and at work.  Her current research, supported by the National Science Foundation, is a study of the standardization of work that relies on relationship, and has taken her from observing primary care in Virginia to juvenile detention classrooms in California to robots in Japan.

She is the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (2015), a study of the effects of job precariousness on intimate life, and the editor of Beyond the Cubicle: Job Insecurity, Intimacy and the Flexible Self (2016). Her first book, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture (2009), won multiple awards and was widely reviewed. In 2019-20, Pugh served as USC Berggruen fellow; she has also been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.  She was the 2013 Marie Jahoda Visiting Professor for International Gender Studies at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, and a 2010-2011 research fellow of the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. 

Her public writing on work, relationships and inequality has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic and other outlets, and she maintains a twitter feed @allison_pugh.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS

The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Insecure Age
Oxford University Press: 2015.

ARTICLES
Pugh, Allison J.  2022. (online first). “Constructing What Counts as Human at Work: Enigma, Emotion and Error in Connective Labor.”  American Behavioral Scientist.  Special issue on “Automated Labor, Digital Technology, and the New Economy,” edited by Jeremy Schulz and Barry Wellman.

Pugh, Allison J.  2022.  “Emotions and the Systematization of Connective Labor.” Theory, Culture and Society. November 39 (5): 23-42.

Brooke Dinsmore and Allison J. Pugh. 2021. (online first). “The Paradox of Constrained Wellbeing: Childhood Autonomy, Surveillance and Inequality.” Sociological Forum.

Marianne Cooper and Allison J. Pugh. 2020. “Families Across the Income Spectrum.” Journal of Marriage and Family. Decade in Review series. Vol 82(1) (February): 272-299.

Pugh, Allison J.  2014. “The Theoretical Costs of Ignoring Childhood: Rethinking Independence, Insecurity and Inequality.” Theory and Society.  January 2014, Volume 43, Issue 1, pp 71-89. 

Pugh, Allison J. 2013.  “What Good Are Interviews for Thinking About Culture? Demystifying Interpretive Analysis.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Vol. 1 Issue 1 (February): 42-68.

First Name: 
Allison
Position: 
Chair of Women, Gender & Sexuality and Professor of Sociology
Email: 
ap9cd@virginia.edu
Computing ID: 
ap9cd
Phone: 
(434) 982-2961
Office Address: 

Women, Gender & Sexuality
101 Levering Hall
PO Box 400172
Charlottesville, VA 22904

and

Department of Sociology
210 Randall Hall
P.O. Box 400766
Charlottesville, VA 22904

Photo: 
Office Hours: 
Spring 2024 Wednesdays, 12:00-2:00pm Sign up here: https://www.wejoinin.com/apugh@virginia.edu