Ghosting, "an unexpected social disconnection between people, often in the context of an intimate relationship," is a prevalent phenomenon among college students today. In Part 2 of our conversation with Professor Allison Alexy, she talks about how ghosting extends beyond romantic relationships and is reflective of The Great Resignation in America today. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, check that out first before tuning into this episode! If you would like to learn more about ghosting and the information from this episode, please see below for a few article recommendations.

Allison Alexy is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a cultural anthropologist focused on contemporary Japan. Through the lens of family life, her ethnographic research investigates changing norms for romantic relationships and legal constructions of intimacy contextualized within the rapid societal changes in recent decades. Her first monograph, Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan, was published through open access and has recently been released in Japanese and Chinese translations. She has co-edited Home and Family in Japan and Intimate Japan (which is also available open access), and is the editor for the Asia Pop! series from the University of Hawai’i Press. She is working on a book now about parental abduction in Japan and has started a new project about ghosting in the US.