On January 29, join us for a talk on Down and Out in Utopia with cultural anthropologist & ASF Fellow Kelly McKowen! With The Atlantic writer Ellen Cushing, McKowen will discuss his research into the experiences of unemployment in social democratic welfare systems, the topic of his forthcoming Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral Education in Norway from University of Toronto Press.
Based on more than a year of fieldwork among a diverse cast of unemployed in Oslo, Down and Out in Utopia offers unparalleled insight into life without work in one of the world’s wealthiest and most egalitarian countries. Though both Norway and the United States measure unemployment rates, McKowen argues, the everyday experience of unemployment is very different in a society with a social democratic welfare system, and so too are the lessons that being unemployed teaches people about government, work, welfare, taxes, freedom, and belonging.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Kell
y McKowen is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University (joining the faculty of the College of William & Mary in fall 2026). His scholarship on political economy, social policy, migration, and morality in the Nordic countries has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Economic Anthropology, the Anthropology of Work Review, and various edited volumes, including Sustainable Modernity: The Nordic Model and Beyond (2018, Routledge) and Migration and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia (2022, University of Wisconsin Press). He is also the co-editor of Digesting Difference: Migrant Incorporation and Mutual Belonging in Europe (2020, Palgrave Macmillan). McKowen received both his MA and PhD in Anthropology at Princeton University.
Ellen Cushing is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes for the culture desk. She was previously the magazine’s special projects editor. Her work has also been published in The Nation, San Francisco Magazine, and BuzzFeed News.