Work
Virtual Session
Description
“Work” is a keyword of contemporary fiction and theory alike. Over the past several decades, as the deepening contradictions of neoliberal capitalism have dovetailed with acute financial crises, the changing nature of work—for example, the decline of historically-specific forms of putatively secure industrial employment and concomitant rise of more precarious sites and modes of labor—has been registered by an expanding assemblage of novels. Novels such as Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All of this Could be Different, Hilary Leichter’s Temporary, Ling Ma’s Severance, Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory, and Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People—among many other recent fictions—evince the different ways in which work is today organized and experienced, across capital’s disparate spatial and temporal coordinates. Notable theoretical interventions, meanwhile, have likewise made vivid the emergent configurations of work in the twenty-first century: the ongoing displacement and transformation of labor by technologies of automation (as explored by Annie McClanahan and Aaron Benanav); the resurgence of care-, sex-, and other socially reproductive forms of work and their integration into a global labor market (as taken up by Neferti X.M. Tadiar); models of racialization that enable different forms of workplace exploitation (as in the work of Colleen Lye and Iyko Day); the enmeshment of human labor power in the broader ecology, or energy regime, of the “capitalocene” (as theorized by Jason Moore and Andreas Malm); and the social and cultural consequence of particular patterns of labor migration and remittance (as elaborated by Paul Nadal). Read comparatively, these and cognate works of fiction and theory possess a dialectical attention to the distinctive political valences and determination of “work” in the current conjuncture—the dialogue between new relations or structures of expropriation and new enunciations of labor movement (within and beyond the space of the formal trade union).
We encourage paper submissions that rethink the relationship between work and literary or cultural form. How do the formal qualities of cultural texts crystallize, in other words, the general shape of capitalist social relations, or the temporality of the working day/life? How does contemporary fiction represent, or reckon with, the manifold experiences and resonances of work in the present, or across time? We are, at the same time, interested in contributions that approach the contemporary articulations of work through a primarily theoretical lens. How has contemporary theory illuminated the forms and relations of work that are paradigmatic—symbolically or materially—to our present, while bringing into view not merely the newness of those forms but their continuity with deeper histories of capitalist unfreedom or depredation (including slavery, indenture, and both waged and unwaged modalities of dispossession)?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Brian Jansen (he/him) is assistant professor of communication and English at the University of Maine. A former technical writer, copywriter, editorial assistant, automotive assembly line worker, and community college faculty member, Brian's work has appeared in the Canadian Review of American Studies, the Journal of Popular Culture, and ESC: English Studies in Canada, among other venues.
Speaker Bio
Qianxiong Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at UCLA with interests in media and performance theory, STS, critical and political theory. His dissertation theorizes forms of exhaustion under the regime of computational media and biotechnology in postsocialist China to interrogate how an expansive sense of media reframes the productions of political subjectivity and the limits and possibilities of political organization and critique. He grew up in Shanghai.
Speaker Bio
Salman Rafique is a doctoral candidate in Screen Studies at Oklahoma State University (OSU), Stillwater. Salman’s dissertation investigates contemporary work-centered cinema's engagement with the cinematic lexicon of exhaustion, depression, and burnout. Salman was the 2023-24 Medical Humanities Fellow of the Center for the Humanities, OSU. His broader research interests include global art cinema, medical humanities, political economy, precarity, gesture, and Beckettian poetics.
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Jason Read is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of several books including The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Annie McClanahan is an Associate Professor of English at UC Irvine. She is the author of _Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture_ and of the forthcoming book _Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work_.
Speaker Bio
Madeline Lane-McKinley is an author, cultural critic, and teacher. Her books include Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times (Common Notions, 2022) and Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy (forthcoming: Haymarket Press, 2025). She teaches for the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and in the Critical Studies Graduate Program at Pacific Northwest College of the Arts in Portland, where she lives. She is also an editor of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, and her writing has appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The New Inquiry, Cultural Politics, and more.
Speaker Bio
Sarah Brouillette is a Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
Speaker Bio
Charlie Tyson is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His scholarship has appeared in Post45 Contemporaries, Dibur, Victorian Literature and Culture, and other journals. His public writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The Baffler, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a critical study of the American work ethic.
Speaker Bio
I am Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century American Literature at the University of Bristol. My research has appeared in Cultural Critique, Discourse, Science Fiction Studies, Crossings, Polygraph, and The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx. I am currently completing a monograph, Representing Precarity: American Literature and Culture from Boom to Crisis. I am also editing a volume with Madeline Lane-McKinley, The Return of the '90s, for Pluto press, and a special issue with Thomas Waller, Keywords for Value and Culture, for CLC Web.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Alden Sajor Marte-Wood (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of English at Rice University. He is a cultural studies scholar whose work focuses on Global Asias and transnational political economy. His current book project, Overseas Filipina Writers: Reproductive Fictions and Fantasies in the World-Literary System, establishes a longue durée continuity between martial law-era crises of social reproduction, the state-sponsored export of care work, the contemporary outsourcing of digital intimacy, and Philippine literary forms.
His writing has appeared in ARIEL, Meridians, Verge, Post45, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, Post Script, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Teaching Economics and American Literature (MLA), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies, Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies, Asian American Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students, and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory.
Speaker Bio
Alya Ansari is a Ph.D. candidate in the program in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, with a graduate minor in Moving Image, Media, and Sound Studies. Her dissertation takes a long view of the unique challenge posed by the representation of work in realist fiction from the nineteenth- and twenty-first centuries. Alya is also an Assistant Editor at Cultural Critique.
Speaker Bio
Patrick Lyons is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Case Western Reserve University.
Speaker Bio
Samuel J.R. Mercer is a lecturer in social policy at Liverpool Hope University and a member of the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism. He has written for journals such as Economy and Society, Decalages and the Irish Journal of Sociology, on Louis Althusser's critique of theoretical humanism and its application for Marxism in the social sciences. His book 'The Ideology of Work' was published in May 2024 with Brill as part of the Historical Materialism Book Series.