Rate My Professor Karla Erickson

A feminist ethnographer of labor, Erickson studies interaction, care, and community in market and institutional settings, with research interests spanning elder care, aging and death, human-machine relations, AI, automation, critical race theory, and technology's social effects. Her books include How We Die Now: Intimacy and the Work of Dying (Temple University Press, 2013), which examines death competence among end-of-life workers; The Hungry Cowboy: Service and Community in a Neighborhood Restaurant (University Press of Mississippi, 2009), analyzing community building in a restaurant; and co-edited Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Histories of a Movement (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Peer-reviewed publications appear in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography ("Knowing Death Well," 2016), Research in the Sociology of Work (2010), Teaching Sociology (2010), Ethnography (2005), and Symbolic Interaction (2004). She has contributed articles to Scientific American, Salon, The Washington Post, Wired, and others. Her current project, Messy Humans: A Sociology of Human/Machine Relations, explores AI's social implications. Erickson received the Harris Faculty Fellowship (2008-2009), Competitive Faculty Research Leave (2012), and Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship (2020-2021). She edited The Midwest Sociologist (2007-2011), reviewed for multiple journals and presses, and serves on boards for Grinnell Regional Medical Center and Grinnell Community Day Care and Preschool.