Educated at Swarthmore College (BA 1962) and UC Berkeley (MA 1965, PhD 1969), Arlie Russell Hochschild is a sociologist whose work takes an ethnographic approach to how emotion is shaped by social life and how consequential our cultural beliefs and social arrangements in family, economic and political life are. Her topics of research have ranged from love coaches, bereavement assistants, and gestational surrogates at a clinic in Gujarat, India to Tea Party and Trump enthusiasts living in the showdown of the Louisiana petrochemical industry. Hochschild holds eight honorary doctorates, has won Guggenheim, Mellon, Ford, Sloan and Fulbright fellowships, and five awards from the American Sociological Association.
Oral History Highlights
What is your current academic status?
Officially, I’m Professor of Sociology Emerita. But honestly, I dislike the term “retired”—since it defines you but what you did, not what you are doing now. Since retiring, I have published three books and the fourth will be out next year. I have never had more fun doing field work—in fact “field work” is a funny name for the work I do. The term “field” suggests one’s “not home” and in one sense, that is true. But one is always working on the stretch between field and home, measuring and describing-- and trying to feel through -- the distance between the two. And I’m not sure one retires from that.