I’m an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin interested in work and inequality, from the agricultural fields to the platform economy. My research and teaching examine time and space in social experience.
PC: MPIfG/Aydee
New York, New York 2018 (PC: K Griesbach)
Overview
My current research examines how workers confront unstable schedules and landscapes of work, and how this affects material wellbeing, identity and relationships. My work draws attention to old and new mechanisms of inequality through in-depth, comparative research across rural and urban spaces. My scholarly work and teaching reflect my commitment to a more equitable future of work and markets for everyday people.
Research and Teaching
Work and the Labor Process
Platform Economy
Social Inequality
Identity and Disruption
Borders and Borderlands
Economic Sociology
Cultural Sociology
Sociology of Time and Space
International Migration
Selected Publications
Griesbach, Kathleen. 2021. “Unequal Reach: Cyclical and Amplifying Ties Among Agricultural and Oilfield Workers in Texas.” Work and Occupations OnlineFirst.
Griesbach, Kathleen. 2020. “Dioquis: Being without doing in the migrant agricultural labor process.” Ethnography 21(4):481-505.
Griesbach, Kathleen, Adam Reich, Luke Elliott-Negri, and Ruth Milkman. 2019. “Algorithmic Control in Platform Food Delivery Work.” Socius 5:1-15.
Griesbach, Kathleen. “Local-Federal Immigration Enforcement in North Carolina: Mapping the Criminal-Immigration Overlap.” 2011. Norteamérica, Revisa Académica del CISAN-UNAM 6(3).
In Progress
Griesbach, Kathleen. “Positioning Stories: Accounting For Insecure Work.” 3rd Revise & Resubmit.
Griesbach, Kathleen. “Theorizing Space in Precarious Work: Inequality within and beyond platforms.” Accepted pending minor revision.
Griesbach, Kathleen. Labor at the Margins: How Time and Space Uncertainty Shape Precarious Work. Book in preparation.
Griesbach, Kathleen. “No Beach Time: Heterogeneous Temporalities of Unstable Work.”
Media Coverage
“At the Mercy of An App: Workers Feel the Instacart Squeeze.” National Public Radio, November 25, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/25/778546287/at-the-mercy-of-an-app-workers-feel-the-instacart-squeeze?live=1.
“Instacart Hounds Workers to Take Jobs that Aren’t Worth It.” Bloomberg Businessweek, July 15, 2019. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-15/instacart-hounds-workers-to-take-jobs-that-aren-t-worth-it.
Teaching: Instructor of Record
“The Social World.” UT Austin. Fall 2022.
“Social Theory.” Columbia University. Summer 2018, 2020.
“Work, Life, Time and Space: From the Factory to the Gig Economy.” Columbia University. Fall 2019.
“The Social World” (Intro to Sociology). Columbia University. Summer 2017.
Big Lake, Texas, 2018 (PC: K Griesbach)