Syllabus
Course schedule
Week 1 (February 22) Introduction
No required reading.
Week 2 (March 1) Marxist understanding of work. Work ethics
Marx, K. (1965). Capital : volume I. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Chapter 1: Commodities; Section 2: The two-fold Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S2
Weeks, K. (2011). The problem with work : feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Chapter 1: Mapping the work ethics, pp. 37 – 78. Available at: https://libcom.org/files/the-problem-with-work_-feminism-marxism-kathi-weeks.pdf
Week 3 (March 8) Social reproduction and care
Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review(100), 99-117.
Week 4 (March 15) Factory work
Maciejewska, M. (2012). Exhausted bodies and precious products: women's work in a Special Economic Zone for the electronics industry in Poland. Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, 6(2), 94-112.
Week 5 (March 22) Emotional and affective work
Penz, O., Sauer, B., Gaitsch, M., Hofbauer, J., & Glinsner, B. (2017). Post-bureaucratic encounters: Affective labour in public employment services. Critical Social Policy, 1 - 22. doi:10.1177/0261018316681286
Warhurst, C., & Nickson, D. (2009). ‘Who's got the look?’ : emotional, aesthetic and sexualized labour in interactive services. Gender, Work & Organization, 16(3), 385-404. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.2009.00450.x
(March 29) No class – Dean’s day
(April 5) No class – The instructor is at a conference – Reading week
Week 6 (April 12) Flexible work of new professionals
Peuter, G. d., Cohen, N. S., & Saraco, F. (2017). The ambivalence of coworking: On the politics of an emerging work practice. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 20(6), 687-706. doi:10.1177/1367549417732997
Week 7 (April 19) Precarious work of supermarket cashiers
Jacobs, A. W., & Padavic, I. (2015). Hours, Scheduling and Flexibility for Women in the US Low-Wage Labour Force. Gender, Work & Organization, 22(1), 67-86. doi:10.1111/gwao.12069
Smith, A., & Elliott, F. (2012). The demands and challenges of being a retail store manager: ‘Handcuffed to the front doors’. Work, Employment & Society, 26(4), 676-684. doi:10.1177/0950017012445091
Week 8 (April 26) Articulation (blending as well as reconciliation) of working and family life
Gregg, M. (2011). Work's intimacy. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity. Chapter 2: Working from home: the mobile office and the seduction of convenience, pp. 39 – 55.
Warren, T. (2015). Work–life balance/imbalance: the dominance of the middle class and the neglect of the working class. The British Journal of Sociology, 66(4), 691-717. doi:10.1111/1468-4446.12160
Week 9 (May 3) Occupational health and worker safety
Rosner, D., & Markowitz, G. (2006). Deadly dust : silicosis and the politics of occupational disease in twentieth-century America (2nd ed.). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Chapter 1: The „cabinet of curiosities“: silicosis and the recognition of industrial disease, pp. 13 – 48.
Week 10 (May 10) Workers’ organizing and labor unions
Kubisa, J. (2016). Gendered division of trade union protests? Strategies, activities and outcomes of union activity among miners and nurses in Poland. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 22(3), 331-345. doi:10.1177/1024258916650409
Week 11 (May 17) Automation and technooptimistic feminism
Hester, H. (2018). Xenofeminism. Oxford: Polity Press. The extract will be uploaded during the semester.
Piasna, A., & Drahokoupil, J. (2017). Gender inequalities in the new world of work. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 23(3), 313-332. doi:10.1177/1024258917713839
Week 12 (May 24) Refusal of work
Weeks, K. (2017). Down with love : feminist critique and the new ideologies of work. WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 45(3), 37-58.
Hatcher, J., & Tu, T. L. N. (2017). "Make what you love" : homework, the handmade, and the precarity of the maker movement. WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 45(3), 271-286.
Syllabus can be subject to change during the semester.
The recommended literature is included in the pdf version of the syllabus.
Academic integrity: Correct referencing and crediting others for their work is inseparable part of academic integrity. Plagiarism of any kind – be it intentional or not – is not acceptable and will be referred to the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities as well as to the Disciplinary Committee for consideration. Students are expected to follow the rules of correct referencing that they will familiarize themselves with in the Academic Writing and Literary Theory course.
Electronic policy Use of laptops is not forbidden. However, reading and annotating of printed texts as well as notetaking in handwriting is strongly encouraged.
Special learning accommodations policy If you have a disability for which you may be requesting an accommodation, please, notify your instructor.
Annotation
The course proceeds from the understanding of work in capitalist economy as wage labor and subsequent feminist criticism of this understanding from the perspective of social reproduction. Following themes are thus covered: wage labor; production/reproduction; Fordist and post-Fordist gender contract; precarious labor; low-paid jobs in manufacturing and services; affective and emotional labor; articulation (reconciliation) of working and family life; union organizing; automation and post-work society; work ethics; disability and work.
The readings include feminist, sociological, political and economic theory, casestudies, ethnographies and historical writing. The course is taught seminar-style, i.e. it consists mainly of the discussion of assigned readings and films and documentaries.
Formal lecturing will be kept to a minimum.