Skip to main content
Kelly McKowen
Assistant Professor
Office:
McGlothlin-Street Hall 104A
Email:
[[kmckowen]]
Areas of Specialization :
Cultural Anthropology; Political Economy; Morality; Labor; Cash Transfers; Digital Technology; Migration; History of Anthropological Theory; Ethnographic Methods; Norway; Europe
Background
I am a cultural anthropologist interested in comparative political economy and the ways that welfare and growth regimes shape subjectivities, moralities, dependencies, and inequalities. My current research focuses on Norway's diverse and evolving social democracy. My first book, Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral Education in Norway (2026, University of Toronto Press), examines the everyday lives of the unemployed in Oslo to rethink the Nordic welfare model as a system of sociocultural and moral instruction. I am currently at work on a second book about the technological revolution remaking social support over the life-cycle in Norway.
My scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropological Quarterly, Economic Anthropology, the Anthropology of Work Review, as well as edited volumes, including Sustainable Modernity: The Nordic Model and Beyond and Migration and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia. I also co-edited Digesting Difference: Migrant Incorporation and Mutual Belonging in Europe (2020, Palgrave Macmillan).
My research has been supported by the Fulbright Program (2010-2011, 2023-2024), the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, the Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education, the Princeton Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.
Education
PhD, Anthropology, Princeton University (2019)
Select Publications
Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral Education in Norway, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2026.
"Coming of Age in Utopia: Youth Unemployment, Social Democracy, and Reciprocal Becoming in Norway." Anthropological Quarterly 98 no. 2 (2025)
"Making Up the Market: Job-Seeker Courses and the Ordinary Ethics of Social Investment in Norway." Acta Sociologica 68 no. 4 (2025): 554-562.
"The Unemployment Business: Profit, Precarity, and the Moral Economy of Social Democracy in Norway." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28 no. 4 (2022): 1192-1210.
Courses Taught
ANTH 300: History of Anthropological Theories
ANTH 350: Cultural Aspects of Business