The Last Human Job: The Implications of Automating Connective Labor

Please join us for this colloquium with Allison Pugh, Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University. 

Her book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton 2024) is based on a study of the standardization of work that relies on relationship. She is also the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (2015), a study of the effects of job precariousness on intimate life, and the editor of Beyond the Cubicle: Job Insecurity, Intimacy and the Flexible Self (2016). 

Pugh’s research and teaching focus on how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at home and at work, and how economic trends – from job insecurity to commodification to automation – can make that harder. 

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and has taken her from therapy sessions in Virginia to juvenile detention classrooms in California to robots in Japan.