Working Toward Connection: Finding Our Way to Each Other and Why It Matters [Week of Wellbeing Symposium]
The UMass Okanagan Week of Wellbeing (WoW) takes place from February 9-13, 2026 for a celebration in a cross-campus collaboration involving the Okanagan Wellbeing Collective, the Office of Equity and Inclusion, Student Affairs, Campus Life, and many others. WoW will provide various opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to relax, connect, and recharge. Join us for this keynote event promoting wellbeing across campus with lightning talks, lunch, and a keynote with Q&A by Allison Pugh, author of The Last Human Job.
SCHEDULE
Welcome Remarks and 7-Minute Lightning Presentations
Topics cover wellbeing initiatives, research, and programming at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
9:00-11:00AM, Student Union Ballroom
- Carolina Aragon, Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, 10 Years of Public Art for Public Good
- Lucy Xiaolu Wang, Resource Economics, The Hidden Infrastructure of Wellbeing
- Dawn Bond, Facilities and Grounds, Pondfires, Red Chairs, Lounges: UMass Facilities' Role in Building Connection
- Wilmore Webley, Office of the Provost, Equity Is Wellbeing: Using the Classroom Equity Action Plan
- Amanda Paluch, Kinesiology, Steps and Health
- Sabrina Hafner, UMass Dining, Nutrition and Wellbeing at UMass Dining
- Dan Bensonoff, Campus Gardens, Growing Food, Growing Community
Lunch
11:00-11:30AM, Student Union Ballroom
Join us for lunch with a menu by Chef Alex customized for this event!
Keynote and Q&A with Allison Pugh: Working Toward Connection: Finding Our Way to Each Other and Why It Matters
11:30AM - 12:30PM, Student Union Ballroom
ABOUT ALLISON PUGH
Allison Pugh is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton 2024) is based on a study of the standardization of work that relies on relationship. She is also the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (2015), a study of the effects of job precariousness on intimate life, and the editor of Beyond the Cubicle: Job Insecurity, Intimacy and the Flexible Self (2016). Her first book, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture (2009), won multiple best book awards and was widely reviewed.
Pugh’s research and teaching focus on how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at home and at work, and how economic trends – from job insecurity to commodification to automation – can make that harder. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and has taken her from therapy sessions in Virginia to juvenile detention classrooms in California to robots in Japan.
The 2024-5 Vice President of the American Sociological Association, Pugh has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a visiting scholar in Germany, France and Australia. She is a former journalist, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic and other outlets.
Pugh grew up in New York City and attended public schools there, working as a waitress at the US Tennis Open and an intern at Ms. magazine. She packed salmon roe in Alaska, interviewed Obama for the Associated Press when he was a law student, and served as a US diplomat in Honduras. She lived for 12 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she co-founded a K-8 charter school in Oakland. She now lives in Washington, DC, and for eight months of the year rows on the Anacostia River with Capital Rowing Club.