Is This Working? Doing as Value

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary course will consider the ways race, gender, ableism, transnational exchange, slavery, technology, immigration, environmental degradation, and the carceral state are implicated in the ways work is divided, practiced, and compensated. We will explore the ways productivity, citizenship, and respectability constellate around the idealized 40+-hour work week and the ways some bodies are used up and rendered debilitated by labor. Why are laziness, unproductivity, and dependence considered moral failings, and how do we define these traits? In the context of nearly two years of living with a pandemic, crushing student debt, rising inflation, and the monetization of everything, this course will toggle between questions of value and values, remuneration and fulfillment, exploitation and satisfaction. We will study a variety of written genres by authors such as DuBois, Graeber, Hochschild, Marx, Melville, Moshfegh, and Weeks.