Arlie Russell Hochschild Biography

My most recent research focuses on the rise of the American right–the topic of my latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, September 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. Based on intensive interviews of Tea Party enthusiasts in Louisiana, conducted over the last five years and focusing on emotions, I try to scale an “empathy wall” to learn how to see, think and feel as they do. What, I ask, do members of the Tea Party–or anyone else–want to feel about the nation and its leaders? I trace this desire to what I call their “deep story”–a feels-as-if story of their difficult struggle for the American Dream. Hidden beneath the right-wing hostility to almost all government intervention, I argue, lies an anguishing loss of honor, alienation and engagement in a hidden social class war. (See The Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Boston Globe.)

In other writing–such as my 2012 The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times–I explore the shifting boundary between market and intimate life and methods by which individuals manage that boundary to keep personal life feeling personal. (See the excerpt in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times, "The Outsourced Self"). My 2013 So How's The Family and Other Essays is a sampler, you might say, of an applied sociology of emotion. It includes essays on emotional labor–when do we enjoy doing it and when not?–empathy, personal strategies for handling life in a time bind, and the global traffic in care workers. See the 2013 book review in the London Times Higher Education Supplement, ("So How's the Family: and Other Essays").

Earlier work has been based on field work among older residents of a low income housing project, (The Unexpected Community), flight attendants and bill collectors who perform "emotional labor" (The Managed Heart), working parents struggling to divide housework and childcare (The Second Shift), corporate employees dealing with a corporate culture of workaholism (The Time Bind), Filipina nannies who've left their children behind to care for those of American families (Global Woman). My work is available in 16 languages.

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