Liz Fouksman

Sociologist; 2017-18 Berggruen Fellow at Harvard EJSCE

Liz Fouksman researches widely held social, cultural, and moral attachment to wage labor and the impediment such attachment poses for new imaginaries of the future of work and distribution in an increasingly automated world, at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. In particular, Liz is investigating the ways unemployed welfare recipients in southern Africa link time-use, work, and income. Her research asks how this feeds into wide-spread resistance to utopian calls for a universal basic income and shorter working hours. Liz holds a doctorate in International Development from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Before coming to the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Liz spent two years as a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Research and Social Justice at the Society, Work and Development Institute, based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Liz’s recent publications include “Development as Knowledge Networks: From Global Ideas to Grassroots Movements” ( Third World Quarterly , 2017) and “What Shall the Fishermen Become? A Review of James Ferguson’s ‘Give a Man a Fish: Reflections of the New Politics of Distribution’” ( Basic Income Studies, 2015).