My research is centrally interested in issues of political culture, class experience, and the moral economy within which political identities and solidarities are formed. My approach is informed by Marxist-feminist political economy and by Marxist traditions of social theory and cultural studies. These are the lenses through which I explore the interplay between various moral claims — to human rights, for example, or to the public sphere — and the material conditions of their articulation. I have taught and published on US Cold War internationalism and the concept of “culture shock;” on urban social struggles and the “right to the city” as a materialist critique of liberal rights discourse; on the paradoxes of human and citizens’ rights; on hegemony and cooptation as hermeneutics for interpreting social movement dynamics. My current work examines contemporary class experience through the lens of capitalist temporality, exploring how capitalist social relations structure and discipline our time — at the minute-by-minute level of gig-workers navigating micro-contracts; day-to-day, as commuters or electronically surveilled remote workers; and across a lifetime as workers looking ahead to “retirement age” and forming their expectations about the length and compensation of their working lives.
I also have a longstanding interest in undergraduate writing instruction and in alternatives to conventional systems of grading. I have been active in a Community of Practice dedicated to exploring grading alternatives that can work within the prevailing grading system at Carleton, and I regularly incorporate a focus on writing skills and practices into my undergraduate courses. I was awarded a Teaching Award by Carleton in recognition of my innovative teaching strategies.
My interests and approaches are thoroughly interdisciplinary: in addition to teaching and mentoring students in Sociology, I am also cross-appointed to the Institute of Political Economy (IPE), the Human Rights and Social Justice Program, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture (ICSLAC).
I currently serve as a member of the Editorial Executive of the journal Studies in Political Economy.
Rebecca Schein, “Free Transit and Social Movement Infrastructure: Assessing the political potential of Toronto’s nascent free transit campaign.” Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, Vol. 22 (2011): 115-123
Rebecca Schein, “Whose Occupation? Homelessness and the Politics of Park Encampments.” Social Movement Studies, Vol. 11, Nos. 3-4 (August-November 2012): 335-341
Rebecca Schein, “Occupiers and the Homeless: A Challenge for the Politics of Occupation.” Progressive Planning, 191 (Spring 2012), 17-19
Justin Paulson and Rebecca Schein (co-authored), “A Response to Workman’s ‘The Left After Politics.’” Studies in Political Economy, Vol. 89 (Spring 2012): 131-138
Rebecca Schein, “Democracy and the Public University: A Conversation with Noam Chomsky.” Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, Vol. 23 (2012), 255-264
Rebecca Schein, “‘Educating Americans for ‘Overseasmanship’: The Peace Corps and the Invention of Culture Shock.” American Quarterly: (December 2015): 1109-1136
Rebecca Schein, “Hegemony not Cooptation: For a Usable History of Feminism.” Studies in Political Economy, Vol. 94 (Spring 2015): 169-176
“Rights” in Keywords for Radicals, edited by Kelly Fritsch, Clare O’Connor, and AK Thompson. AK Press: 2016
“From Free Time to Idle Time: Time, Work-Discipline, and the Gig-Economy,” in Marxism and Law, edited by Umut Ozsu and Paul O’Connell, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021.
