Isabelle Ferreras is Tenured Fellow of the Belgian National Science Foundation (F.N.R.S., Brussels), professor at the Université catholique de Louvain, and a senior research associate of the Labor and Worklife Program where she coordinates the WorklifeWizard/PayWizard research project. A sociologist (PhD, Louvain) and a political scientist (MSc, M.I.T.), she is also an alumna of the Harvard Trade Union Program (Class of 2005). Ferreras' research focuses on the multiple dimensions of work and labor in the context of the service-based capitalist democracy. She held research or teaching appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Department of Political Science at M.I.T., the Center for European Studies at Harvard, the Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Bremen, and the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (Delmenhorst, Germany).
Isabelle Ferreras published "Critique politique du travail. Travailler à l'heure de la société des services" (Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2007/2010). Based on what Ferreras constructs as critical case in the context of the service-based economy – the case of supermarket check-out clerks, the book contribues an original sociological theory of work. It shows that as a social experience, work today is an 'expressive', 'public', and in fact deeply 'political' experience. Moreover, it shows that the normative content of this political experience relates to the democratic intuition. Ferreras wrote book chapters or papers which appeared at Cambridge University Press, Frommann-Holzboog (Stuttgart), Academia-Bruylant (Bruxelles), L'Harmattan (Paris) etc., Boston Review, Raisons pratiques (Paris), Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques (Louvain-la-Neuve) etc. She is currently working with Wage Indicator-collected data for a book tentatively titled "What Is Work?"
Contact:
ferreras@alum.mit.edu
