Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Organization Logo Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

Faculty Fellow

Gabriel Winant

Associate Professor of History and the College University of Chicago

Biography

Gabriel Winant is a historian of the social structures of inequality in modern American capitalism. His work approaches capitalism as an expansive social order—not confined to the market alone but rather structurally composed of multiple, heterogeneous spheres. He focuses on the relationship between economic production and formal employment, on the one hand, and the social reproduction and governance of the population, on the other. Broadly, he is interested in transformations in the social division of labor and the making and management of social difference through this process. Winant's first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Manufacturing and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, investigates the rise of the “service economy” in the aftermath of manufacturing. His second project, tentatively titled Our Weary Years: How the Working Class Survived Industrial America, explores similar problems in an earlier period.

To learn more about Gabriel Winant's research and publications, please visit his profile page at the Department of History.

Topics

Featured Project

Detail of a tapestry depicting workers on a picket line.

Which Side Are You On? The Labor Movement Between Theory and Practice

Project Team:

Project Topics:

2026 – 2027
Learn More

Projects

What Force on Earth: Theorizing the Labor Movement

Tapestry featuring labor organizers

What Force on Earth: Theorizing the Labor Movement

Is the labor movement a subject for political theory? This grant brings together scholars from across many disciplines, along with organizers and labor leaders, to explore what political visions, institutional structures, and organizing strategies might seize the opportunities of the present...
Are labor unions a subject for political theory? What would it be to provide such a theory? Many of the conceptual staples of the labor movement — solidarity, common interest, economic leverage — are relatively concrete, functioning largely as practical and instrumental ideas. At the same time, the ...

Project Team:

Project Topics:

Learn More