Faculty | Ilana Gershon
Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Culture
Email: igershon@indiana.edu
Phone: 856-3728
Office: 215
Education
- Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2001
Background
Professor Gershon writes and teaches about anthropology of democracy, multiculturalism and ethnographies of new media in the United States, Oceania, and New Zealand. In The Break-Up 2.0 I analyze an ethically charged practice: how people use new media in romantic break-ups. I am currently researching how new media are affecting hiring and firing in the U.S. recession workplace.
My previous work explored why Samoan migrants experience different ways of being culture bearers in New Zealand and the United States.
Courses Recently Taught
- I205 International Communication
- C314 Mass Media in Other Cultures
- C412 Ethnicity, Class, and the Model U.S. Citizen
- C415 Persuading with Words, Persuading with Culture
- C446 Cultures of Democracy
- C627 Networks, Systems, and Flows: Theories of Circulation
Publication Highlights
- 2012 No Family is an Island: Cultural Expertise among Samoans in Diaspora (Cornell University Press)
- 2011 “Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age” Anthropological Quarterly 84(4): 867-896.
- 2011 “Neoliberal Agency” Current Anthropology 52(4): 537-555.
- 2011 “Studying Cultural Pluralism in Courts versus Legislatures” Polar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 34(1): 155-174.
- 2010 The Break-Up 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media (Cornell University Press)
- 2008/ Culture in the Spaces of No-Culture, /Guest Editor with Janelle Taylor of special issue for /American Anthropologist /110(4).
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2005 “Seeing Like A System: Luhmann For Anthropologists”
/Anthropological Theory /5(2): 99-116.
