Andrew Ross

Andrew Ross (born 1956) is the chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A writer for "Artforum", "The Nation" and "The Village Voice", he is also the author and/or editor of numerous books. Much of his writing focuses on labor and the work force, from the Western world of business and technology to sweatshop labor in the Third World. Making some use of social theory as well as ethnography, his writing questions the human cost of economic growth and has an activist, anti-globalisation approach.

Ross was born and educated in Scotland. After graduating from the University of Aberdeen in 1978, he worked in the North Sea oil fields. His graduate studies were undertaken at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Indiana University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1985, and left in 1993 to become Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies at NYU. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 2001-2. His dissertation, about modern American poetry, was published as "The Failure of Modernism" in 1986. Several subsequent books ("No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture", "Strange Weather", and "The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life") established his reputation as one of the leading practitioners of cultural studies, particularly in the fields of popular culture and the history of technology.

Increasingly, his writing focused on urban sociology and labor studies. A scholar and activist associated with the anti-sweatshop movement, he published "No Sweat" in 1998 and "Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor" in 2002. In 1997, he took up residence for a year in Disney's new town of Celebration, Florida, and wrote "The Celebration Chronicles", based on his ethnography of the town's residents. Two further books were based on field work with workers; "No-Collar", about employees in Internet companies during the New Economy boom and bust, and "Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade", about skilled Chinese employees of foreign firms in Shanghai and other Yangtze Delta cities. The latter book, written on the ground in China, is a frank alternative to Thomas Friedman's pro-outsourcing views on corporate globalization.

From 1986 to 2000, Ross served on the collective of Duke University's "Social Text" journal, which has published some of the most influential essays in social and cultural analysis. In 1996 he was one of the journal's editors who accepted a paper by Alan Sokal professing to show connections between physics and post-modern theory, and which was later revealed by Sokal to be a hoax meant to expose the low academic standards of "post-modernism" (see Sokal affair).

He has been active in the academic labor movement since the late 1990s, both in the national AAUP, and at NYU as a vocal supporter of the graduate student union, and as a founding member of Faculty Democracy.

External links

* [http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/SE Interview with Andrew Ross about "Fast Boat to China" on April 17, 2006 in the WFMU (New Jersey) Radio Archives]
* [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1055139 Interview with Andrew Ross about Celebration, Florida and the Disney Corporation on NPR Radio, August 10th, 1999.]