ÌÇÐÄvlogÊÓƵ

Bio

 is a cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching interests include capitalism, the state, labor, cash transfers, morality, digital technology, and contemporary Europe (particularly the Nordic countries). His scholarship on unemployment and the welfare state in Norway 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. He is also the co-editor of  (2020, Palgrave Macmillan). His current book project, Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral Education in Norway (under contract with University of Toronto Press), examines the everyday lives of the unemployed in Norway to rethink the Nordic welfare model as a system of sociocultural and moral incorporation.

McKowen's 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.

McKowen has been nominated twice by students for ÌÇÐÄvlogÊÓƵ's HOPE Professor of the Year Award. He currently serves as the Faculty Co-Chair of the university's Global Strategy Committee.

Research Interests

Growth and Welfare Regimes • Work and Unemployment • Morality and Ethics • Digital Technology • Scandinavia

Courses Taught

Introductory Cultural Anthropology • Introduction to Ethnographic Methods • Cultural Aspects of Business • Culture and Diversity in American Life • Society and Culture in Contemporary Europe • History of Anthropology, Part Two • Advanced Seminar in Ethnology: Economy and Morality

Current Graduate Students

Arturo Avalos • Sara Beth Becker • Genevieve Soucek