Эндрю Росс: Қоғамтанушы, зерттеуші және сыншыл ойшыл

Scottish sociologist

Andrew Ross (born 1956), a Scottish born social activist and analyst, is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University (NYU). He has authored and edited numerous books, and written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Newsweek, and Al Jazeera. Much of his writing focuses on labor, the urban environment, and the organisation of work, from the Western world of business and high technology to conditions of offshore labour in the Global South. Making use of social theory as well as ethnography, his writing questions the human and environmental cost of economic growth.

Ross was born and educated in the Lowlands of Scotland. After graduating from the University of Aberdeen in 1978, he worked in the North Sea oil fields. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1984. which is a blend of ethnography and investigative journalism. In Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City, Ross draws on his fieldwork in Phoenix, Arizona. Focusing on areas such as water supply, metropolitan growth, renewable energy, downtown revitalisation, immigration policy, and patterns of pollution, the book argues that urban managers have to base policy on combating environmental injustices to avoid replicating the condition of eco apartheid that prevails in Phoenix and other major urban areas. One of his books, Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal, analyses, and proposes solutions to, the massive household debt burden that has accumulated over the last two decades. The book considers some of the legal and moral principles of the Jubilee South movement–aimed at repudiating external debts of developing countries–and adapts them to the situation of household debtors in the North. Creditocracy engages with ideas and actions from the Occupy movement of debt resistance to Wall Street's creditor class. In Richard Posner's 2003 study, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Ross was ranked among the top 100 public intellectuals in the US. From 1986 to 2000, Ross served on the editorial collective of Duke University Press's journal Social Text. In 1996 the journal published a paper by Alan Sokal professing to show connections between physics and post modern theory, which was later revealed by Sokal to be a hoax meant to expose the low academic standards of "post modernism" (see Sokal affair). Social Text was awarded the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature for being taken in by the hoax. One of Ross's books, Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel, tells the story of the Palestinian stone industry, along with its stonemasons and construction workers. Based on extensive field interviews, the book documents the conditions and challenges of workers in quarries and factories in the West Bank and it follows their movement across the Green Line to work on Israeli construction sites. Stone Men won the Palestine Book Award for Social History in 2019. In his book, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing, he assesses the national housing crisis through the lens of Central Florida, one of the most difficult places for low income people to find affordable housing. Taking up residence in the region's budget motels, where a variety of households live in a permanent basis, he reports on the challenges faced by residents in these single room domiciles, as well as in tent encampments in the woods. In 2015, Ross helped to launch NYU's Prison Education Program Research Lab, The Lab's faculty and formerly incarcerated students do research on carceral debt.

Ross has been active in the anti sweatshop movement since the mid 1990s. From the late 1990s, he has turned his attention to the academic labour movement, both in the national AAUP, and at NYU as a vocal supporter of the graduate student union, and as a founding member of Faculty Democracy. In 2007, his co edited volume, The University Against Itself, documented and analysed the long strike at NYU in 2005 by GSOC UAW (The Graduate Student Organizing Committee). Ross has been critical of labor conditions in Abu Dhabi and similar fast growth environments for a number of years. A founder of the Gulf Labor Coalition, he has helped to organise campaigns to raise migrant labour standards in the United Arab Emirates. In 2015, he edited an anthology of art and writing from Gulf Labor entitled, The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor. An early participant in Occupy Wall Street, he helped found the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and has been an integral member of the Occupy Debt Assembly and Strike Debt—a coalition formed in the summer of 2012 to help build a debtors' movement. Strike Debt produced the Debt Resisters' Operations Manual and organised the Rolling Jubilee. He is an active member of the Debt Collective, a prototype debtors' union. He also serves on the board of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).