WORK IN PROGRESS: A Dialogue between the worlds of artists and scholars on work and labour

 

We would like to invite you to join the seminar Work in Progress: A dialogue between the worlds of artists and scholars on work and labour, which will take place on the 18^th of April, at 15:30 GMT (London time) on Zoom (link below)

This seminar will bring together scholars from diverse disciplines with artists, critics, and curators – to discuss ideas of work and labour across space and time. The focus is on investigations and representations about both the material dimension of work and its political-economic dimension (labour). Starting with the current realities of work, we envision moving to historical trajectories and representations, and on to future potentialities and alternatives of production and praxis. We situate this initiative at the intersection of academic research, fieldwork investigations, artistic production, and collective action. In all these realms, the process of creation involves confronting questions about how to grasp and represent the repeated transformations of work that animated modern capitalism and that are particularly cogent at the present moment, as we have a situation of global polycrisis in society and economy.

The format of the seminar will bring together participants to respond to the same set of questions. This seminar draws on the activity of the group Workplaces: Pasts and Presents and the digital exhibit hosted on its platform https://workplaces.omeka.net/

Organisers: the Workplaces: pasts and presents group, in dialogue with Maica Gugolati, Katya Lachowicz, Sandra Lourenço.

The Workplaces: Pasts and Presents working group was established in the context of the European Labour History Network. It brings together, in an interdisciplinary fashion, recent historical, sociological, anthropological and visual work that presents new methodological and epistemological perspectives on the study of capitalism at the point of production. With this call, we aim to bring together historians and social scientists of different hues, as well as museum curators, documentary filmmakers, to discuss new research and artefacts that focus on the past and present of the factory with a historical perspective. The focus is on thematic and methodological perspectives that engage with dimensions such as gender, race, the spatial and transnational turn, discourse analysis etc. that have cross-fertilised with the perspective of class that was traditionally adopted by the labour history of the factory.

Please note that the seminar will be recorded and disseminated as a podcast on our online platform.

Zoom Meeting https://mdx-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93874917677?pwd=eWMxYnMrNDVUTGg4UW5QS2dvU2ZEdz09 Meeting ID: 938 7491 7677 Passcode: 263251