About Me

I gave everything to the job

For years, I was the kind of worker who gave everything to the job: long days, late nights, weekends, willing to travel, even move. I tried to be exactly what a manager would want: useful, competent, always available. I didn’t really expect work to love me back, but some part of me hoped it would. The gap between how much I poured in and how little the arrangement actually held me became the question behind all of my research.

I caught the research bug while working in advertising as a young account executive at a New York agency. I was handed a plane ticket and sent to run consumer focus groups in three international cities — Chicago, Manchester, Mexico City. Sitting behind the glass, I realized I’d always been interested in people’s stories and how those stories fit together. Maybe it started with my own: half Egyptian, half Jewish, raised in a part of rural Georgia where almost everyone around me was white and Baptist — a kid who both never fit in and always fit in, and learned early to read a room and translate across worlds. The questions only got bigger from there — through a PhD in sociology at the University of Virginia; research in Sydney on the future of work; and years as a program evaluator measuring whether organizations’ good intentions actually held up. My journey led me through both statistics and narratives, and I move easily between them to get at the heart of the idea and to translate it for others.

My book, Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us (University of California Press), is my most comprehensive project. It’s an in-depth investigation of the quiet labor workers absorb when institutions fail them. I now bring the research to stages and organizations as a speaker and consultant, giving people language for something they’ve felt at work but could never quite name.

I live in Athens, Georgia — the place I’m from, and the place I chose to come back to. After years of following the work across the country and around the world, I came home: for family. Using Athens as my home base, I am enjoying traveling, introspection, and slowly doing the work of becoming part of a community.