What compels us to work? Scholarship across the critical humanities has been strangely silent on this question. On the one hand, old proletarianization narratives have died hard, suggesting a generally whiggish movement from artisanal work and/or household production to the labor market and from social and customary compulsions of craft, tradition, family, and ascription to double freedom (freedom to quit, freedom from the means of self-sufficiency/production). Standing next to these conceptions lies broad accounts of enslaved, bonded, household and seigneurial labor giving way—through revolutionary upheaval or gradual legal and social transition—to doubly free labor. These narratives often cross-pollinate each other and inspire debates about classification—was women’s ‘traditional’ work under legal regimes of coverture and customary obligations effectively bonded or did it fall under the broad rubric of household production? What defines the frontiers between slavery and freedom? Between reproduction and production?

Despite increasing addenda and internal debates, these long-standing narratives remain the central schema in which theorists and scholars categorize discrete contexts of labor. The typical direct answers to the question of what specifically compels us to work—structured internally by the category of labor taken as subject—such as the whip, the contract (labor or marital), the work ethic, the tradition or norm, the state or more recently “mute compulsion,” often elide more than they explain. This seminar proposes to ask and—begin the task of answering—what happens to our narratives of labor if we start not from categories of work (industrial, reproductive, agricultural, care, service, etc) or worker (proletarian, indentured, servant, mother, enslaved, convict, proprietor, etc), but from a thickly described compulsion and coercion? What defines work and its potential antitheses in a given context? Why do we work in general? Why do we work, more or less, when we work? Why do we work where we work?  Who—broadly construed to imply not just individuals but groups, institutions, and states—structures the answer to these questions across space and time?   The co-organizers invite proposals that interrogate these and related questions in discrete global contexts and comparatively across space/time and that are grounded in a diversity of source bases, critical traditions, and methodologies.