Dr Liz Fouksman

Biography

Dr Liz Fouksman is a Lecturer (equivalent Assistant Professor) in Social Justice at the Centre for Public Policy Research in the School of Education, Communication and Society at King's College London. She is also a research associate of the University of Oxford and the University of the Witwatersrand.

Liz has a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford, and has held research fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the Berggruen Institute and the Ford Foundation at (respectively) the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the University of the Witwatersrand.

Research

Liz's research focuses on understanding moral, social and cultural attachments to work and working. It looks at the impediment such attachments pose to new imaginaries of the future of labour and distribution in an increasingly automated world. In particular, Liz focuses on the ways the long-term unemployed in countries with high inequality and unempoyment rates think about links between time-use, work, and income. The research project looks to fieldwork in South Africa and Namibia to ask how such links challenge both proposals to expand social protection through means such as unconditional cash transfers, as well as more radical calls for the decommodification of labor via mechanisms such as a universal basic income guarantee and/or shorter working hours. Liz also does action-research with the global movement around universal basic income guarantees (UBI), and complements research in southern Africa with comparative case studies in the Global North.

Dr Fouksman's past research has also examined the way networks of development organizations (foundations, NGOs and grassroots activists) create civil society knowledge networks that produce, spread and dispute ideas, in particular environmental ideas, from the grassroots to the global and back again. This project focused on two multi-sited case studies, each with a global foundation (one in the USA, the other in Switzerland) funding in-country NGOs (in Kenya and in Kyrgyzstan respectively), which in turn support pastoralist communities in enacting ecologically-focused projects.

Recent papers include:

• The moral economy of work: Demanding jobs and deserving money in South Africa. Economy and Society, 49:2, 287-311. 2020.
• Labour, laziness and distribution: Work imaginaries among the South African unemployed (co-authored with H. J. Dawson, equal contribution). Africa, 90(2): 229-51. 2020.
• Radical transformation or technological intervention? Two paths for universal basic income (with E. Klein, equal contribution). 2019. World Development 122: 492-500.

Liz also writes popular press articles on topics including the future of work, the cost of basic income, South African social policy and economic security.

PhD supervision

Liz is happy to supervise PhD projects connected to work and labour, or welfare policy, cash transfers, inequality and distributory justice.