Department of History

Neil Johnson-Rogers is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Watson School for International and Public Affairs and in the Department of History at Brown University. He is a historian of labor, technology, and capitalism in the United States.

 

His first book-length project, High Skills, Low Wages, traces the rise and fall of job training in the liberal political imagination, from the end of World War II to the beginning of the twenty-first century. During these years, generations of academics, legislators, union officials, business executives and educators cohered around a consensus that structural unemployment—induced by automation, deindustrialization, or shifts in the balance of global trade—was a problem that primarily afflicted the “unskilled.” The solution, they thought, was to retrain and “upskill” those most vulnerable to dislocation. High Skills, Low Wages, shows how the logic of job training was conditioned by the imperatives of defense mobilization, how it was operationalized on the shop floor, and ultimately how it was reimagined as a means of individualizing the responsibility for “human capital” investment, rather than as a social democratic instrument for labor market planning.

 

Johnson-Rogers received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has also worked as a Case Writer and Learning Experience Designer at the University of Michigan’s Center for Socially Engaged Engineering and Design. At Brown, he will work on his book manuscript and teach courses on the labor history of automation.