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Paper short abstract

I present my new book manuscript: a wry restudy, 100 years later, of Siegried’s Kracauer’s The Salaried Masses. Blending anthropology and confessional comedy, this behind-the-scenes look at research and academic survival asks what it means to study insecure professionals when you are one of them.

Paper long abstract

Having lived and worked in seven countries and across multiple universities, I have witnessed every corner of academia’s underbelly: the unrelenting pressure to publish or perish, the groveling for funds, the serial rejections. My new book manuscript distills this experience into an academic comedy whose protagonist is not an ivy league professor but the far more common academic foot soldier, fumbling through research and career survival and, in the process, revealing the absurdities of professional life more broadly.

I will read the opening section of my book, which sets the scene. Drawing inspiration from Siegfried Kracauer's classic The Salaried Masses, which documented 1920s Berlin white-collar workers with precarious employment and questionable diversions, the anthropologist turns a spotlight on today's professionals struggling to find value in their work. This romp through Berlin's labor courts, career fairs, and jobseeker workshops, alongside anxiety-inducing conferences, publishing ordeals, and an endless cycle of applications, weaves together critical insight and personal mishap. As the anthropologist repeatedly asks herself, “What would Kracauer do?” and falls short, she chases an awakening “along the lines of Eat Pray Love, only without the food, spirituality, or sex.” Along the way, she learns from similarly struggling professionals that “even shitty jobs gave them something to project onto the world, if only to say that they were more and better than their job descriptions.”