Work Stories

How has “work” and our attitude towards it figured in the both the popular and the radical imagination over two hundred years? Starting with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, this eight-week investigation uses literature, philosophy, sociological studies and historical documents to investigate labor in its diverse global incarnations over the past two centuries.

Throughout the course, students become familiar with the major topics and theories in the comparative study of work. Areas of investigation include the industrial and pastoral novel, the sociology of work, Marxist theories of work, slavery, fugivity and marronage, the refusal of work, feminist approaches to work, Fordism and the assembly line, material and immaterial labor, the “work” of art, cognitive capitalism, global care-work and the politics of housework.

Texts we investigate together will include works by Dickens, Gaskell, Hardy, Marx and Engels, Benjamin, Chaplin, Satoshi Kamata, the Detroit factory workers, Sadiya Hartmann, Neil Roberts, Maurizio Lazaratto, Franco Berardi, Antoni Negri, Silvia Federici and the International Wages for Housework Movement.