Rachel Sherman
Rachel Sherman is Professor of Sociology. She is broadly interested in how and why unequal social relations are reproduced, legitimated, and contested, and in how these processes are embedded in cultural vocabularies of identity, interaction, and moral worth. Empirically, she uses ethnography and in-depth interviewing to investigate service work, entitlement and lifestyle, and redistributive movements in the contemporary U.S. Her teaching includes courses on qualitative methods, class, work and labor, social movements, culture, and consumption.
Her first book, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (University of California Press, 2007), draws primarily on participant observation research to analyze how workers, guests, and managers in these hotels make sense of and negotiate the class inequalities that mark their relationships.
Her second book, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton University Press, 2017), uses in-depth interviews to explore the lived experience of privilege among wealthy and affluent New York parents. The book has been covered or reviewed by the New York Times, the New York Post, the Times of London, Vice, the Financial Times, Commentary, Nature Books in Brief, and the BBC World Service. An adapted excerpt appeared at The Guardian. Sherman's essay for the New York Times Sunday Review, published in conjunction with the book, is here.
As a 2018-2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, she conducted research for her current book project, titled Class Traitors. Here she explores the world of wealthy progressives who are challenging the unequal social systems that have enabled their wealth--analogous to, and often overlapping with, white antiracists striving to dismantle systems of white supremacy. Class traitors work against accumulation and toward redistribution through social justice philanthropy and investing, partnering with grassroots social movements, and pushing policy alternatives such as higher taxes on the rich, as well as organizing other wealthy people. An early essay from that work is here.
She has also conducted research on the contemporary U.S. labor movement; on expert service work, especially the "lifestyle management" industry; the interactive artwork of Tino Sehgal; and food services in the airline industry.
Education
- AB 1991, Brown University
- PhD 2003, University of California, Berkeley
Source: The New School
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