Andrea Muehlebach
Andrea Muehlebach, Ph.D. (University of Chicago, 2007)
Assistant Professor, UTM
(905) 569-4581 (Main)
(416) 946-0122
Office: NB 267 (Main) and AP 332
Field: Socio-cultural anthropology; social theory; anthropology of the state and citizenship; ethics and personhood; neoliberalism; labor and affect; welfare; European public culture; Italy.
Research
My research interests broadly focus on the relationship between economics, politics, and ethics. I first explored these intersections in a book entitled The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy, published in 2012 by The University of Chicago Press. The Moral Neoliberal looks at why and to what effect processes of neoliberalization often come in highly moralized forms, what roles sentiments such as solidarity and compassion play in the building of new forms of collective living, and how labor and affect get marshaled to this end. Ultimately, this book contributes to a conversation that asks what the moral authoritarianism that has come to accompany marketization means for an oppositional ethics. I continue to pursue this question through an exploration of precarity in Italy as well as through ethnographic work at an "alternative" prison on the outskirts of Milan. I am also writing about the museumization of Fordism (Fordist factories, machines, bodies, and forms of labor) in Sesto San Giovanni, the Northern Italian City of Factories, where I continue to do fieldwork.
Classes taught include: Social Theory; Money, Markets, and Gifts: Topics in Economic Anthropology; Globalization and the Changing World of Work; Anthropology of the Modern State; Metamorphosis of Citizenship.
Book
2012 “The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy.” The University of Chicago Press.
Special Issue
2012 Editor (with Nitzan Shoshan) of a special issue entitled “Post-Fordist Affect,” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, #2, Spring 2012.
Articles
Forthcoming The Catholicization of Neoliberalism. American Anthropologist Vol. 115, No. 3. September 2013
Forthcoming On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year
2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology. American Anthropologist Vol. 115,
No. 2. June 2013
2011 "On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy." Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 26 (1): 59-82. Click here for author interview.
2009 "Complexio Oppositorum: Notes on the Left in Neoliberal Italy." Public Culture. Vol. 21(3): 495-515
2006 "The Old World and its New Economy: On the “Third Age” in Contemporary Western Europe.” With Jessica Greenberg. In: Generations and Globalization. Jennifer Cole, Deborah Durham (eds.). Indiana University Press.
2003 “What Self in Self-Determination? Notes from the Frontiers of Transnational Indigenous Activism.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Vol. 10(2): 241-268.
2001 “Making Place at the United Nations. An Anthropological Inquiry into the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 16(3): 415-435.
Book Reviews & Commentary
2013 Integration. Invited Commentary in "Field Notes on Affect." Cultural Anthropology "Fieldsites." Available at http://production.culanth.org/fieldsights/59-field-notes-on-affect
2013 Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy. In: Reviews and Critical
Commentary: A Forum for Research and Commentary on Europe. February 1,
2013. Available at http://councilforeuropeanstudies.org/critcom/labor-disorders-in-neoliberal-italy-mobbing-well-being-and-the-workplace/
2012 Times of Neoliberalism. Commentary. Etnofoor. Taste. Volume 24(2): 165-169
2012 Review of Hannes Grandits (ed.): Volume 1: The Century of Welfare: Eight Countries. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2010; and Patrick Heady and Peter Schweitzer (eds.): The View from Below: Nineteen Localities. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2010. Series: Family, Kinship and State in Contemporary Europe. Anthropos, 107.2012/2 (September).
2010 Review of "Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism." Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 83 (3): 709-715.
