The Weather Report: Andrew Ross in Conversation with Cindi Katz
Andrew Ross is a social activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, Artforum, Jacobin, New York Review of Books, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of 25 books and hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics—labor and work, urbanism, politics, technology, environmental justice, alternative economics, music, film, TV, art, architecture, and poetry. His articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines as well as in academic and public interest journals, and his books are published by mainstream trade, academic, and independent presses. He has lectured at hundreds of universities and cultural institutions in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Australia. Politically active in many movement fields, he is the co-founder of several groups–Gulf Labor Artists Coalition, Global Ultra Luxury Faction, Coalition for Fair Labor, Occupy Student Debt Campaign, Strike Debt, the Debt Collective, and Decolonize This Place—and is an organizer with others, including the American Association of University Professors and the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He also serves on the steering committee of the national network of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.
In several of his books, Ross has pioneered a method he calls “scholarly reporting,” which is a blend of investigative journalism and ethnography. The American Studies graduate program he has directed on and off for the last three decades has produced many students who specialize in innovative methods. In Under Conditions Not of Our Choosing, he reflects on the challenge of combining activism with writing and scholarship. Of his politics, Ross describes himself as a left eclectic, “allergic to despair,” who draws on the legacy of several traditions: socialism, anarchism, left-libertarianism, radical democracy, and decolonial justice. In his spare time, he is a supporter of Liverpool F.C.
Cindi Katz is Deputy Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research addresses social reproduction and the production of space, place, and nature; the consequences of global economic restructuring for everyday life; children and the environment; and the intertwined spatialities of homeland and home-based security.
Katz has published widely on these themes as well as on social theory and the politics of knowledge in edited collections and journals such as Society and Space, Social Text, Signs, Feminist Studies, Prospects, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Social Justice, Urban Geography, Gender, Place and Culture, Public Culture, and Antipode. She is the author and editor of several books, including Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives (2004), which received the Meridian Award for outstanding scholarly work in geography from the Association of American Geographers; Full Circles: Geographies of Gender over the Life Course (1993), coedited with Janice Monk; and Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction (2004), coedited with Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell. From 2004 to 2008 she was editor with Nancy K. Miller of WSQ, Women’s Studies Quarterly, which won the 2007 Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). She has served on numerous editorial boards.
The past recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Association of University Women, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University, Katz was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2003–04. In 2011–12 she was the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professor of Gender Studies at University of Cambridge.
