Andrea Muehlebach’s research and teaching focuses on the anthropologies of welfare, neoliberalism, citizenship, labor and ethics in contemporary Europe, specifically Italy. Her first book, The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy, focused on the rise of voluntarism in the provisioning of service provisioning and asked why and to what effect processes of neoliberalization often come in highly moralized forms, what roles sentiments such as solidarity and compassion play in the building of new forms of collective living, and how new forms of labor and affect get marshaled to this end.
Andrea is currently working on two new projects. The first investigates the global rise of “industrial heritage” through the museumization of Fordism (factories, machines, bodies, and forms of labour and collective action) in Sesto San Giovanni, the Northern Italian “City of Factories,” where she did her fieldwork. She is also beginning to explore the topic of precariousness, prisons, and neoliberalism in and around Milan.