JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITYEST. 1876

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Allison Pugh

Allison Pugh

Research Professor

Contact Information

Research Interests: Personal Relationships; Work and Occupations; Qualitative methods; Gender

Education: PhD, University of California Berkeley

Sociology > People > Allison Pugh

Allison Pugh is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.  Pugh’s research and teaching focus on how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at home and at work, and how economic trends – from job insecurity to commodification to automation – can make that harder.  Her book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton 2024) won the 2025 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA).    She also writes about best practices regarding qualitative methods.   The 2024-5 ASA Vice President, Pugh has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a visiting scholar in Germany, France and Australia.  

My interests straddle sociological subfields such as culture, work, childhood, gender, emotion and inequality.  My eyes are always on care, connection, dignity, belonging, and how these social goods can be impeded by economic trends from job insecurity to automation.  I am most interested in contradiction —  how people can be trapped between competing societal dictates about how to be a good spouse, good friend or good worker, and the struggle to reconcile these colliding ideals. I am particularly attuned to the emotional signals these struggles give off.   I am also motivated by children’s rights and children’s justice, amidst the social construction of age inequality.    I use qualitative, interpretive methods such as in-depth interviewing and ethnography, and have published work about methodological best practices.
I am the author of three books and one edited volume.  Most recently, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton 2025) won multiple book awards, including the 2025 ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Award. It has also been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Science and was named to “best of” lists by Nature, Public Books, and the New Scientist.  I also wrote The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (Oxford 2015), a study of the effects of job precariousness on intimate life; and Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture (California 2009), which won several book awards and has been widely reviewed.  Until The Last Human Job, my most influential publications have been in qualitative methods and in childhood studies, for which I recently won a mid-career award from the ASA. 

Selection of publications (all publications at: http://allisonpugh.com) 

Pugh, Allison J.  2023. "Connective Labor as Emotional Vocabulary: Inequality, Mutuality and the Politics of Feelings in Care-Work.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol. 49, No. 1 (Autumn): 141-164. https://doi.org/10.1086/725837

Allison J. Pugh and Sarah Mosseri.  2023. “Trust-Building versus ‘Just Trust Me’: Reflexivity and Resonance in Ethnography.”  Frontiers in Sociology.  Special Issue on “Ethnography in the Open Science and Digital Age: New Debates, Dilemmas, and Issues,” edited by Colin Jerolmack, Alexandra Murphy and Victoria Reyes. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1069305

Pugh, Allison J.  2023. “Constructing What Counts as Human at Work: Enigma, Emotion and Error in Connective Labor.”  American Behavioral Scientist.  Vol 67: 14: 1771–1792. Special issue on “Automated Labor, Digital Technology, and the New Economy,” edited by Jeremy Schulz and Barry Wellman. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221127240

Best Paper award, Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS).
 
Pugh, Allison J.  2022.  “Emotions and the Systematization of Connective Labor.” Theory, Culture and Society. November 39 (5): 23-42. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211049475
 
Pugh, Allison J.  2014. “The Theoretical Costs of Ignoring Childhood: Rethinking Independence, Insecurity and Inequality.” Theory and Society.  January 2014, Volume 43, Issue 1, pp 71-89.  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9209-9
 
Pugh, Allison J. 2013.  “What Good Are Interviews for Thinking About Culture? Demystifying Interpretive Analysis.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Vol. 1 Issue 1 (February): 42-68.  Available here.
In the top 8% of 27.7 million articles tracked by Altmetric; ranked 15th out of all AJCS publications.