Zoe Sherman
Zoe Sherman is interested in the political economy of communications and cultural production; she spent most of her thirties digging into the history of how audience attention became a commodity in the U.S. She has also written about women in the Marxist intellectual-activist tradition and about value theory. She is a regular contributor to Dollars & Sense magazine and a member of that magazine's editorial collective.
Biography
Zoe Sherman was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Massachusetts, and has lived in Boston since 1999. She has been a member of the economics department at Merrimack College since 2014. Her popular economics writing can be found regularly in Dollars & Sense magazine — she is also on the editorial collective supporting other writers' development.Education
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B.A. Bard College at SImon's Rock, Great Barrington, MA 1999
M.A. University of Massachusetts Boston, 2007
Ph.D. University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2014
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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Zoe's areas of research are the political economy of communications and cultural production.
Books
Articles
Interrogating the Analogy of the Marketplace of Ideas, Interpreting the First Amendment
Published: Apr 07, 2019 by Forum for Social Economics, Volume 48 Number 2
Authors: Zoe Sherman
An oft-cited argument for the speech rights guaranteed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is that free trade in the metaphorical marketplace of ideas is a route toward truth. But this metaphorical marketplace of ideas coexists with a literal marketplace of ideas in which communications professionals provide the speech and assemble the audiences that clients pay for.
Portrait of the Scholar as an Old Man: EGSO's Eulogy for Steve Resnick
Published: May 29, 2018 by Rethinking Marxism, Volume 30 Issue 1
Authors: Zoe Sherman
Stephen Resnick’s mentorship, teaching, and research profoundly influenced several generations of students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. When he died at the beginning of 2013, many students who had taken his classes and several who were working on dissertations under his guidance were still enrolled in the doctoral program in economics. These are the reflections of the last generation of students to work directly with Steve, as shared at the memorial service held on campus.
Commodified Attention, Commodified Speech, and the Rejection of Expertise
Published: Apr 26, 2018 by Forum for Social Economics, Volume 47 Number 2
Authors: Zoe Sherman
The communications system we inhabit has two features that corrode that trust: commodified access to attention and commodified speech. The advertising industry and the media that serve it treat our attention as a commodity. In addition, much of what we hear is said by people who speak on behalf of others to earn a paycheck. These are not conducive conditions for the cultivation of broadly recognized expertise.
Opening Value Theory to the Brand
Published: Feb 27, 2018 by Rethinking Marxism, Volume 29 Issue 4
Authors: Zoe Sherman
This essay explores the value form of branding as it can be understood through an interpretation of Marx's value theory in the tradition of Resnick and Wolff. It argues that a brand is best understood as a fictitious value form—a construct that allows expected future revenues to circulate as current values.
Primitive Accumulation in the Cultural Commons
Published: Jun 25, 2015 by Review of Radical Political Economics, Volume 48 Number 1
Authors: Zoe Sherman
A culture is a kind of common created by social communications and composed of both information and attention. Over the last hundred and forty years or so, the United States has seen an aggressive move toward the privatization of both the information and attention facets of the cultural commons.