Dr. Alex J Nelson
Dr. Nelson is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Indianapolis. He completed his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2020 and conducts research related to the anthropology of love, the transformation of romantic relationships and gender relations in South Korea, and the socioeconomic and sociolegal concerns of internet-facilitated sex workers in the US and beyond.
Anthropology of Love
Exploring the diversity of cultural constructions of romantic love and relationships
Along with my collaborators I am engaged in multiple projects to explore what the ethnographic record can teach us about the nature of romantic love, not just as an ideal, but as it is experienced and practiced around the world. These studies have included a cross-cultural survey, reviews of the ethnographic record on love and romantic relationships, and an edited book (under review) on marriage and fertility decline around the world. This work has appeared in The International Handbook of Love (Springer), The Handbook of Human Mating (Oxford University Press), Cross-Cultural Research, and Sapiens.
Romance, Family, & Gender in South Korea
Examining how changes in perceptions and experiences of romantic relationships shape marriage and fertility decline
I have spent over two years conducting mixed-method ethnographic research in South Korea on perceptions of and experiences with love and romantic relationships. The central conclusion of my work is that cultural norms governing gender, dating, and marriage are undergoing a process of partial de-institutionalization whereby expectations of these relationships and understandings of how to navigate them have significantly diversified, which in turn create more opportunities for conflict, the need to hedge bets against breakups and divorce, and ultimately to delayed marriage and fertility. I am still in the process of publishing much of my findings and testing these hypotheses through further research. This research has been published in my dissertation, as well as The International Handbook of Love (Springer), and the journals Cross-Cultural Research, and Anthropological Quarterly.
Internet-Facilitated Sex Work
Investigating the business strategies of and stratification among erotic entrepreneurs
I began my work studying erotic entrepreneurship in 2013 with Dr. Kate Korgan of UNLV. We created the erotic entrepreneurs project to examine the ways that independent escorts in the US were not just doing “work” but were entrepreneurs who had to develop many of the skills of marketing and client management that other small businesses require, though do so within a liminally legal space. in 2019, I partnered with Dr Yeon Jung Yu of WWU to expand this research to understanding the emerging sector of webcam modeling and content creation. Our work explores Cam Models’ use of social media through a long-running study of cam models’ twitter/X usage, as well as a study of stratification on the camming platform MyFreeCams.com. I also work with sex worker outreach organizations interested in applying social science methods of data collection. This work is all collaborative and a means of training student researchers in how to conduct ethical and rigorous research on sexual economies through my research labs. This work has been published in the Journal of Sex Research, Exertions, Sex Work Today (NYU Press), and the Gender Policy Forum.