Gregory Duff Morton is an economic anthropologist and social worker. He wants to know how people send value across borders in the Americas.
Morton has a special interest in social movements on the left. A key example, for him, is the MST, Brazil’s landless movement, which brings small farmers together to occupy plantations.
Morton is also concerned with the practical questions faced each day by case managers, psychologists, nurses, and teachers—in both the US and Latin America. He engages with migrants who are navigating the social service system in several countries at once. By thinking internationally about human services, we can equip ourselves to confront the inequalities so characteristic of public life in the Americas.
Education
- PhD, Anthropology and Social Service Administration, University of Chicago 2015.
- AM, Social Service Administration (MSW Equivalent), University of Chicago 2009.
Courses
- ANTH. 20100 – Cross-Cultural Perspectives, LALS 28000/ Anthr. 28000/ ECO 28001 – Latin American Progress? Ethnographies of Economic Growth and Technology; Peoples of Latin America; Latinidades in Service: Mental Health, Migration, and Human Services across Borders
- With multiple co-authors. “Recommendations on Brazil to President Biden and the new administration: Policy paper.” US Network for Democracy in Brazil (January 2021).
- Büyükokutan, Barış, Marco Garrido, Benjamin Merriman, Gregory Duff Morton, and Besnik Pula. “A global authoritarian turn?” Trajectories: Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section 31(1-2): 8-16 (Fall 2019/ Winter 2020).
- Co-editor (with Adam Sargent) for special collection, “Remuneration in an Unequal World,” Anthropological Quarterly 92(3), Summer 2019.
- Sargent, Adam and Gregory Duff Morton. “Introduction: What happened to the wage?” Anthropological Quarterly, 92(3): 635-662 (2019).
- Morton, Gregory Duff. “How work counts: Time, self-employment, and wagelessness in rural Brazil.” Anthropological Quarterly 92(3): 663-696 (2019).
- Morton, Gregory Duff. “The power of lump sums: Using maternity payment schedules to reduce the gender asset gap in households reached by Brazil’s Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer.” World Development, 113: 352-367 (2019).
- Morton, Gregory Duff. “Saying no: Bolsa Família, self-employment, and the rejection of jobs in northeastern Brazil.” Chapter 10, pages 178-192 in Money from the Government in Latin America: Conditional Cash Transfer Programs and Rural Lives. Maria Elisa Balen and Martin Fotta, eds. Abingdon: Routledge (2019).
- Morton, Gregory Duff. “Blood on the land in Brazil.” New York Review of Books Daily. March 5, 2018. http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/05/blood-on-the-land-in-brazil/
- Morton, Gregory Duff. “Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing face of work.” Dialectical Anthropology, 42(2): 207-225 (2018).
- Morton, Gregory Duff. “Types of permanence: Conditional cash, economic difference, and gender practice in rural northeastern Brazil.” Chapter 3, pages 113-140 in Cash Transfers in Context: An Anthropological Perspective. J.P. Olivier de Sardan and E. Piccoli, eds. New York: Berghahn Books (2018). (Text of chapter is close, but not identical, to Portuguese-language article “Acesso à permanência,” below).
- Morton, Gregory Duff. “Managing transience: Bolsa Família and its subjects in an MST landless settlement.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 42 (6): 1283-1305 (2015). Republished as a chapter in Tarlau, Rebecca and Anthony Pahnke, eds. Brazilian Agrarian Social Movements. Abingdon: Routledge (2016).
- Morton, Gregory Duff. “Modern meetings: Participation, democracy, and language ideology in Brazil’s MST landless movement.” American Ethnologist, 41(4): 728-42 (2014).
- Morton, Gregory Duff. “Protest before the protests: The unheard politics of a welfare panic in Brazil.” Anthropological Quarterly, 87(3): 925-933 (2014).
- Morton, Gregory Duff. “Acesso à permanência: Diferenças econômicas e práticas de gênero em domicílios que recebem Bolsa Família no sertão baiano.” (“Accessing permanence: Economic difference and gender practice among households that receive Bolsa Família in the backlands of Bahia, Brazil.”) Política e Trabalho, 38: 43-67 (2013).
