By gathering and listening to people’s stories, the hallmark of her work, Hansen takes us on journeys across the U.S., from 19th century everyday working lives in New England, to a Dakota Indian reservation in the early 20th, to the mid-century factory and cannery town life in Northern California, to the economic precarities of hospitality workers in the 2020s.

Through sustained ethnographic fieldwork, Hansen develops relationships with subjects as she chronicles their oral narratives. By attending to a diversity of worldviews, she weaves a wide array of stories into tapestries of understanding. In her new book, she illuminates the conditions at a public high school whose extraordinary educators coached and led a diverse student body, as adults and youth co-created a shared sense of belonging.

Always attuned to class dynamics, Hansen has recently begun a detailed study of downward mobility in contemporary US society. Through life history interviews with workers in Georgia and Massachusetts, she is exploring the processes that can trigger or accelerate successive losses, a phenomenon she calls cascading. She is also attending to the protections, interruptions, and expressions of resilience in a person’s life that can stem or reverse a downward slide.