JOSH SEIM

I'm an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at Boston College. My research focuses on questions of governance, suffering, and labor. On the one hand, I am interested in how frontline governance workers handle those populations that bear the brunt of misery in the stratified city. On the other hand, I am interested in understanding how they and other workers suffer under the varied conditions of a capitalist labor process.

This has led me into the sociologies of work, medicine, punishment, and more. I have studied ambulances, prisons, parole, and welfare offices, and I am becoming increasingly interested in platform-based gig work and other cases. I also frequently write about ethnographic methods and pedagogy. 

My research has appeared in American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Sociological Methods and Research, Social Science and Medicine, Sociology of Health and Illness, Punishment and Society, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Critical Sociology, and other outlets. My first book, Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering, was released in 2020 by University of California Press. I'm currently writing a book on welfare workers in Los Angeles (under contract with University of California Press).