Gretchen Purser: Engaged Research and Emancipatory Sociology
Dr. Purser joins GMU's Proseminar in Public and Applied Sociology for a discussion of engaged research and sociological intervention in the 2020s.
Monday, October 28, 2024 6:00 PM to 7:10 PM EDT
RSVP NOW CLOSED
Gretchen Purser is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She is also the research director on advocacy and activism for PARCC, where she coordinates the Labor Studies Working Group. Purser is deeply involved in community struggles for social and economic justice. Since 2012, she has served as chair of the board of the Workers’ Center of Central New York. She is also involved with the Syracuse Tenants Union.
She received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. in sociology from Smith College. Prior to joining the faculty at Syracuse, she was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at University of California at Davis. Purser has held fellowships at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is currently a fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program.
Purser’s scholarship focuses broadly on precarious work and the low-wage labor market as well as the reproduction and lived experience of urban poverty in the U.S. She uses ethnographic and/or community-based research methods to explore the changing nature of work and workers’ movements, the housing struggles of the poor and the ground-level practices of neoliberal poverty management.
Her work has been recognized with a wide variety of publication awards from the American Sociological Association’s sections on Labor and Labor Movements, Marxist Sociology, Sociology of Human Rights, and Public Sociology. She is also a two-time recipient of the John Russo and Sherry Linkon Award for Best Published Article from the Working Class Studies Association. Purser is an Associate Editor for both Critical Sociology and Research in the Sociology of Work. She is a Commissioning Editor for both the Marxist Sociology Blog and Work In Progress, public sociology blogs of the American Sociological Association.
Please RSVP at the top of the page.
Hosted by Department of Sociology and Anthropology .
Sponsored by Center for Social Science Research, Next System Studies at GMU.
