Allison Pugh teaches sociology at the University of Virginia, where her work centers on culture, care and inequality, with a focus on children and families. Her work focuses on three broad areas:
Care, the market, and inequality:- Longing and Belonging reflects research into the following questions: How does economic strain affect the way families manage their care needs? How do parents show care for children through the things they buy? How do race and class intersect in the kinds of choices families face in constructing childhoods, and how they approach the prospect of their child's experience of difference? How do variations in school culture affect the ways in which children navigate social differences?
- In the Journal of Consumer Culture, Pugh investigates how the unpredictability of money in the low-income home affects the kind of childrearing parents can provide.
- See Gender & Society for work on how the market allows women to bridge the two competing and absolute systems: all-consuming work and symbolically fraught motherhood.
- Current research and teaching looks at the relationship between postindustrial insecurity on the job and at home.
- See this review essay for insight into how the economic downturn affects the way families negotiate kin and non-kin obligations.
- Contact Pugh to see the article, forthcoming in Sociological Inquiry, which addresses the ways parenting affects parents, beyond models of economic and psychological depletion.
- See Longing and Belonging for understanding about how children navigate the intense consumer culture in which they find themselves, and what they do when they find themselves excluded from it.
- Contact Pugh to see the article in preparation which addresses what kind of insights studying children and childhoods offer to broader questions in social theory.
- Contact Pugh about ongoing research into the following questions: What are the unacknowledged ways children contribute to their communities? What are the roles children play in webs of reciprocity? What do children of gay and lesbian families have to teach us about handling moments of difference, stigma and childhood resilience?
Pugh is currently involved in three research projects: 1) an investigation into the culture of postindustrial job and family insecurity as embedded in settings like workplaces and schools, and how this culture shapes the ways in which parents and children talk about commitment; 2) a theoretical piece exploring how children's standpoint can inform central sociological debates about power, inequality and community; and 3) a collaborative look at how the children of gay and lesbian parents navigate issues of difference at school. Her research has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
