I’ve been remiss about mentioning some recent developments. Perhaps the biggest news is that I received the 2017 Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA). The Dunlop award—named after the former Secretary of Labor and past president of LERA, John T. Dunlop—”recognizes the best contribution to research that addresses an industrial relations/employment problem of national significance.” (VCU later featured me in a Q&A and a news release about the award.)

I’m going to shove all my other news into the rest of this post, using that friend of professors everywhere, the bullet-point list:

• Last month I was invited to speak at a conference hosted by the US Department of Health and Human Services in Washington. My lecture slides for the conference, Deep Poverty in the United States (sponsored by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Urban Institute), can be found here.
• I was interviewed by CUNY’s Richard Ocejo for the podcast New Books Network (NBn). We discussed my book Cut Loose and had a wide-ranging conversation about inequality, technology, and the economy. (Rich just came out with a great new book, Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy, which was featured on NPR’s Marketplace.)
• I wrote a post for the blog Working-Class Perspectives on MIT economist Peter Temin’s new book The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy. (No relation to my previous book, The Missing Class.) I discuss Temin’s theory that changes in the economy and political system have created two Americas: a well-educated and well-connected minority, and a majority falling into stagnation and despair.
• I was invited to write a short essay for Contexts, the American Sociological Association’s magazine, as part of a panel of scholars writing about the white working class and its politics, including its role in the 2016 presidential election.
• I was quoted for stories about food stamps that ran on the NPR affiliate and ABC affiliate here in Richmond.