Precarious Work

Alyson Cole is a professor and the executive officer of political science at the Graduate Center at CUNY. She is the recipient of the 2008 President's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Mellon Resident Fellow at the Humanities Center in 2009-2010. Her research and teaching interests bridge political theory and American politics/culture. Cole is the author of The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford University Press 2007). Her articles have appeared in Signs, American Studies, Feminist Studies, the Michigan Law Review, and the National Women's Studies Association Journal. She is on the editorial boards of WSQ, and International Journal of Criminology, and Sociological Theory.Victoria Hattam is a professor of politics and chair of the department at the New School for Social Research. She holds a BA from the University of Melbourne, an MA from SUNY Buffalo, and a PhD in political science from MIT. Hattam taught at Yale University, and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before joining the New School faculty. She was president of the Politics and History Section of American Political Science Association for 2006-2007, and is a member of the editorial board of the journals International Labor and Working-Class History and Studies in American Political Development.

This issue of WSQ exposes the effects of precarity on the current labor force.