Andrew Ross

Andrew Ross (born 1956), a Scottish-born social activist and analyst, is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University (NYU). He has authored and edited numerous books, and written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Newsweek, and Al Jazeera. Much of his writing focuses on labor, the urban environment, and the organisation of work, from the Western world of business and high-technology to conditions of offshore labour in the Global South. Making use of social theory as well as ethnography, his writing questions the human and environmental cost of economic growth. Life and education Ross was born and educated in the Lowlands of Scotland. After graduating from the University of Aberdeen in 1978, he worked in the North Sea oil fields. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1984. He joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1985, and left in 1993 to become Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies at NYU. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 2001–2002. and has held research positions at Cornell University and Shanghai University. Early writing His doctoral dissertation, about modern American poetry, was published as The Failure of Modernism in 1986. Several subsequent books (No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture; Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits; and The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society) established his reputation as one of the leading practitioners of cultural studies, particularly in the fields of popular culture, ecology, and the history of technology. Later writing Increasingly, his writing focused on urban sociology, labour, and the organisation of work. A scholar and activist associated with the anti-sweatshop movement, he published No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers in 1998 and Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor in 2002. In 1997, he took up residence for a year in Disney's new town of Celebration, Florida, and wrote The Celebration Chronicles, based on his participant observation of the town's residents, the first ethnography of a New Urbanist community.