Most recently, I’ve been focusing on university faculty—and, particularly, on the practice of protecting some faculty from arbitrary or unexpected termination by granting them tenure. This research relies on semi-structured interviews, an original dataset of “tenured-terminations,” federal statistics, and legal doctrine. I argue that tenure is a valuable employment protection within an industry that is subject to high threshold investments, low wages, and poor exit options. This line of research has produced a few articles and an in-progress crossover monograph, The War on Tenure, which is under contract with Cambridge.

Between 2016–17, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the gig economy with a view to exploring how workers understand and experience their status as “independent contractors,” who are excluded from many of the benefits and protections accorded to “employees.” This research helped me understand why our system for classifying workers, though it’s widely considered unfair and inefficient, nevertheless seems partly intuitive and difficult to escape. My edited volume, Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation, was published by Cambridge in 2021.