| 1 | Name: | Dr. Arlie Russell Hochschild | |
| Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | ||
| Year Elected: | 2021 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1940 | ||
Educated at Swarthmore College (BA 1962) and UC Berkeley (MA 1965, PhD 1969), Arlie Russell Hochschild is a sociologist whose body of work is ethnographic in method, theoretical in focus, and broad-reaching in its areas of concern. Method: While virtually all of her work is based on close-up observations and interviews, her topics have varied widely. For example, dual-job families raising young children (The Second Shift), love coaches, bereavement assistants, and gestational surrogates at a clinic in Gujarat, India (The Outsourced Self), occupants of a low-incoming housing project for the elderly (The Unexpected Community) and Tea Party and Trump enthusiasts living in the showdown of the Louisiana petrochemical industry (Strangers in Their Own Land). In what will be her tenth book, she’s currently doing interviews with poor whites conservatives and liberals in Appalachian Kentucky. Purpose: How much and how, she has asked, is emotion shaped by social life? More than we have imagined, she suggests, and in a wide variety of ways. For example, our social and cultural circumstances help shape how we recognize or ignore, label, interpret and judge emotion. We are virtually always applying “feeling rules” she argues, to whatever it is we feel. In any given circumstance, we ask ourselves, does an emotion feel normal? Understandable? Fitting or right? Given such feeling rules, we then manage emotion in socially various ways in both private or public life. All of this shows how “deep the social cuts” and therefore how consequential are our cultural beliefs and social arrangements in family, economic and political life. She recently applied this approach to care workers managing the crisis of Covid-19. Other scholars, too, have used and developed the concept of emotional labor, which has, like the idea of a “second shift,” gone mainstream. The American Sociological Association now has an organized section for the study of emotions. Outreach: Throughout her career, she has striven to speak to both a professional and public audience. A number of her books have been New York Times bestsellers. To date, Strangers in Their Own Land has sold a quarter of a million copies, and a four-part documentary based on it is currently in production. Plays have been based on The Time Bind ( “Work Will Make You Free” by the Royal Danish Theatre) and a musical, “One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State” based on Strangers was performed at Suffolk University in Boston. She has written book reviews for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and opinion pieces for the Times, the Guardian, and other newspapers. She has also authored a children’s book, Colleen, the Question Girl. Hochschild holds eight honorary doctorates from such institutions as Harvard University (2021), the University of Lausanne (2018), the University of Oslo (2000), and Swarthmore College (1993), as well as the Ulysses Medal from the University College Dublin, (2015). She has won Guggenheim, Mellon, Ford, Sloan and Fulbright fellowships as well as five awards bestowed by the American Sociological Association. These include the Charles Cooley Award (for The Managed Heart), the Jessie Bernard Award (for The Second Shift, The Time Bind, and Global Woman), and the Award for Public Understanding of Sociology (for lifetime achievement). In awarding her the Jessie Bernard Award, the citation observed her "creative genius for framing questions and lines of insight, often condensed into memorable, paradigm-shifting words and phrases." Strangers in Their Own Land was a finalist for the National Book Award and her work appears in 17 languages. | |||