APLA reading group: The Pandemic Workplace

Datum
04. April 2025 

Online Read­ing Group

The APLA read­ing group con­tin­ues with the book „The Pan­dem­ic Work­place” by lana Gershon

We will all chat on Fri­day, April 4th from 12–1 pm east coast time.

Intro­duc­tion:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q4LtQg07uHHSG3fPVqmOHGThs0EA2rJS/view?usp=sharing

Con­clu­sion:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZjeFc6TjYbKfUMZvpFGyoaVAJfFc-jgM/view?usp=sharing

The meet­ing will be 12–1 pm EST Fri­day, April 4th and can be reached by click­ing on this Zoom link:

https://iu.zoom.us/j/94049124398

Look­ing for­ward to see­ing you all virtually,

Ilana

Press blurb: A provoca­tive book argu­ing that the work­place is where we can learn to live demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly (or not).

In The Pan­dem­ic Work­place, anthro­pol­o­gist Ilana Ger­shon turns her atten­tion to the US work­place and how it changed—and changed us—during the pan­dem­ic. She argues that the unprece­dent­ed orga­ni­za­tion­al chal­lenges of the pan­dem­ic forced us to rad­i­cal­ly reex­am­ine our atti­tudes about work and to think more deeply about how val­ues clash in the work­place. These changes also led us as work­ers to engage more with the con­tracts that bind us as we rethought when and how we allow oth­ers to tell us what to do.

Based on over two hun­dred inter­views, Gershon’s book reveals how nego­ti­at­ing these ten­sions dur­ing the pan­dem­ic made the work­place into a lab­o­ra­to­ry for demo­c­ra­t­ic living—the key place where Amer­i­cans are learn­ing how to devel­op effec­tive polit­i­cal strate­gies and think about the com­mon good. Explor­ing the explic­it and unspo­ken ways we are gov­erned (and gov­ern oth­ers) at work, this acces­si­ble book shows how the work­place teach­es us to be demo­c­ra­t­ic citizens.x