Liz Fouksman received her doctorate in International Development from the University of Oxford in 2015, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Before coming to the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Liz spent two years as a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Research and Social Justice at the Society, Work and Development Institute, based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Liz’s past research topics have ranged from the spread of environmental ideas in communities and nonprofits in East Africa and Central Asia, to child labor practices in South Indian folk opera troupes, to the views of 19th-century Russian orientalists traveling in colonial India and Burma. The connecting thread is an abiding fascination with the ways in which norms and worldviews travel and take hold in different parts of the globe, reshaping societies, cultures and political economies in their wake. Liz’s current project examines our moral, social and cultural attachment to wage labor, and the impediment such attachment poses for new imaginaries of the future of work and distribution in an increasingly automated world. In particular, Liz is investigating the ways unemployed welfare recipients in southern Africa link time-use, work, and income. Her research asks how such links challenge futurist calls for the decommodification of labor via mechanisms such as a universal basic income guarantee and/or shorter working hours. During her fellowship year, Liz plans to extend and shape this project into a series of articles and a book. Liz Fouksman is a Berggruen Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.