My work emphasizes public discourses regarding labor and unemployment. As part of this project, I recently began to look at the ideology of what James Arnt Aune terms “the rhetoric of economic correctness,” meaning, among other things, the modern, western propensity to champion the benefits of the free market without considering any (potential) deleterious social repercussions. Such rhetoric also encompasses the ways that neoliberal thought presumes that the market is the most efficient and fair mechanism for ameliorating social ills. I am equally interested in the politics of the contemporary economic class situation in the United States where, in order to secure and maintain power, professionals have joined forces with the super-wealthy in a kind of faux populism against the so-called secular liberal elite. Finally, my work considers how the entrenched ethos of individual responsibility overtly marginalizes all those who struggle, including back-to-work welfare mothers or the longterm unemployed. |
