labor studies – High Theory

Sillies: Jeans

by webwitchJune 3, 2023June 3, 2023UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Warning: this episode of High Theory is very silly.

In our new summer series of “Sillies,” Saronik and Kim ask each other how simple things will achieve the grandiose task of saving the world. In this episode, Saronik asks Kim how jeans will save the world. Yes, we mean denim, not genes.

Some reading that might help assuage the silliness, and support our absurd arguments is listed below:

Raymond Malewitz, The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture (Stanford UP 2014).
Sam Binkley, Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Duke UP 2007).
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago UP 2006).
Herbert Schiller, “Communication and Cultural Domination,” International Journal of Politics 5 no. 4 (Winter 1975/1976). {apparently the source of the term “cultural imperialism”}

In this episode we used sound effects from freesound.org. To make the episode we downloaded sounds created by the following users: MATRIXX, aj_heels, deleted_user_5959249, LittleRobotSoundFactory, TarynMichelle101, Yellowbear, voxlab, NikiPlaymostories, TasmanianPower, trader_one, milkywaysurroundsme, josefpres, BugInTheSYS, paulnorthyorks. Click the link to hear the sound.

This episode’s silly image was created by Saronik Bosu.

Party

by webwitchMay 23, 2023May 23, 2023UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Sheila Liming talks about the party, social gatherings that occasion joy and dread and various emotions in between. The party is both a pause and an acceleration in the life-work continuum, it can deaden political motivation and engender fresh politics. We discuss the horrible parties in The Office and the wonderful parties in Small Axe, among other things.

Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, where she teaches classes in American literature, writing, and media. She is the author, most recently, of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time (Melville House, 2023), and also of the books Office (Bloomsbury, 2020) and What a Library Means to a Woman (Minnesota UP, 2020). Her writing has appeared in publications like the The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, LitHub, The Globe and Mail, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Tagged : American Studies / anthropology / Audre Lorde / behavioral psychology / capitalism / celebration / gathering / labor studies / literary studies / psychoanalysis / Small Axe / sociology / The Office

Global Asia

by webwitchMay 13, 2023May 13, 2023UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Cheryl Narumi Naruse talks about the transformation of Singapore over the past decades into a site of postcolonial promise, with economic prosperity and cultural soft power. She discusses a range of texts ranging from official state documents to the immensely popular book and movie adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians, which bear witness to and contribute to this change.

Cheryl Narumi Naruse is Assistant Professor of English and the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Tulane University. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures (particularly those from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands), diasporic Asian and Asian American literature, postcolonial theory, cultures of capitalism, and genre studies. Her first book, Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore is forthcoming from University of California Press in 2023. She is also working on a second monograph which explores the illegibility of Singapore/Malaysia—as the comparatively “cold” Southeast nations in the context of the Vietnam War—in Asian American and postcolonial studies.

Tagged : Asian American / Asian American Literature / Asian Economics / Asian Literature / capitalism / Diaspora / East Asia / Economic Geography / economics / globalization / history / Korea / labor studies / Marxism / Neoliberal / South Korea / Southeast Asia

Off-Shore Aesthetics

by webwitchDecember 16, 2022December 16, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Sritama Chatterjee talks about a model of literary criticism that she developed in the process of writing her new essay on shipbreaking in Bangladesh. It is a form of materialist understanding for texts, places, and geographies together, taking into account particular signifiers of a place and looking at correspondent literary responses.

Sritama is a literary and cultural theorist of the Indian Ocean World, in the Literature program at the Dietrich School of Arts and sciences, University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation project titled, “Ordinary Environments and Aesthetics in Contemporary Indian Ocean Archipelagic Writing” has been awarded an Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from her graduate school for outstanding research and scholarly excellence. Her work on the Indian Ocean archipelagos also takes the shape of a collaborative public-facing, community project Delta Lives, which platforms communities in Sundarbans telling their stories. As part of her commitment to rethinking environmental humanities pedagogy, she has edited a cluster on “Water Pedagogies: From the Academy and Beyond” published by NICHE Canada which brings together a set of eleven articles from scholars and activists reflecting on water pedagogy.

Tagged : blue humanities / capitalism / ecocriticism / feminism / geography / labor studies / Marxism / poetics / ship / waste

Presentism

by webwitchMarch 27, 2022July 26, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Anna Kornbluh talks about presentism, the anachronistic historical practice of studying the past with contemporary frames of understanding. While some orthodoxies might consider it to be tantamount to historical heresy, presentism can be a powerful tool in building histories of anti-establishment struggles, such as women’s and workers’ rights movements. The conversation also focuses on the work of the V21 Collective, a research collective that Anna organizes, which applies presentist methods to Victorianist scholarship.

Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research and teaching focus on the novel, film, and critical theory, especially marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and formalism. She is the author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago 2019), Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury “Film Theory in Practice” series, 2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014). Her current research concerns impersonality, objectivity, mediation, and abstraction as residual faculties of the literary in privatized urgent times. She is the founding facilitator of two scholarly cooperatives: V21 Collective and InterCcECT.

Image: © 2022 Saronik Bosu

Music used in promotional material: ‘Past has not Passed’ by James Blackshaw

Tagged : capital / capitalism / critical theory / feminism / historiography / history / labor studies / Marxism / narrative theory / political economy / strikes

University Press

by webwitchMarch 18, 2022July 25, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Rebecca Colesworthy talks about the university press and how its workings should be demystified, what authors should keep in mind when they pitch their books, and what university presses do for the state of academic labor.

Rebecca Colesworthy (she/her) is senior acquisitions editor at SUNY Press. Her areas of
acquisition include literary studies, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, Latin American
and Iberian studies, Latinx studies, African American studies, Indigenous studies, and education.
She is the author of Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange (Oxford UP,
2018) and co-editor with Peter Nicholls of How Abstract Is It? Thinking Capital
Now (Routledge, 2016). She is on the editorial board of MAUSS International; has taught at New
York University, University at Albany, SUNY, and Skidmore College; worked for a handful of
years in the nonprofit sector; and holds a PhD in English from Cornell.

Music used in promotional material: ‘Nerys & Leo’ by Bloom K Trio

Tagged : author / Black Studies / critcal race studies / editor / humanities / labor / labor studies / Latinx studies / liberal arts / monograph / organization / publication / Publishing / scholarly book / scholarship / union / university / worker / workers' rights

Flatness

by webwitchJanuary 31, 2022July 14, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Noreen Masud talks about the unnamed feelings and ambiguous modes of relationship occasioned by flat landscapes, and the act of looking at them, in twentieth century fiction, especially the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein.

Noreen Masud is a Lecturer at the University of Bristol, UK, currently working on flat landscapes in twentieth century literature. Her first academic book, Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, is out with OUP in 2022, and her first trade book, A Flat Place, will be released by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and Melville House Press in the US in 2023.

Image: © 2022 Saronik Bosu

Music used in promotional material: ‘In Your Hollow’ by Allysen Callery

Tagged : affect / affect theory / description / fiction / formalism / imagery / labor studies / landscape / modernism / modernist / narrative theory / pathetic fallacy / poetics / twentieth century

Drone Life

by webwitchSeptember 18, 2021June 22, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Amy Gaeta uses the relationship between humans and technology, non-military use of drones being a prime example, to rethink concepts of passivity and how it can bring about change. She makes an intervention in science and technology studies from her position in feminist and disability studies, drawing from diverse theoretical sources like the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Saidiya Hartman, Alexander Weheliye, and Mark Fisher.

Amy Gaeta is not utopian; she is a student of understanding how we survive a world that is killing us on a dying planet, a feminist disability activist and scholar, poet, punk, and PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her academic work specializes in the psychological aspects of human-technology relations under the surveillance state. In poetry, she explores mental illness, desire, and the impossibility of being human.

Image: “‘Little Planet’ style edit of a 180-degree panorama of my daughter’s little league game this summer” by Tim Bish.

Music used in promotional material: ‘Unsunny Sundays’ by Chris Herb.

Tagged : capitalism / disability / disability studies / labor studies / science studies / technology / technology studies

Deindustrialization

by webwitchJuly 26, 2021June 13, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Gabriel Winant talks with Kim about the decline of the industrial working class and the rise of the health care industry.

Gabriel is an assistant professor of History at the University of Chicago. His book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, is recently out from Harvard University Press. You can read his recent article on the subject in The New York Times.

The Next Shift focuses on the working class in the American context and Pittsburgh in particular. In the full version of our conversation, Gabriel recommended Aaron Benanav’s book Automation and the Future of Work (Verso 2020), for an argument about the larger global economic structures of deindustrialization. He also talks a bit about James Boggs, as someone who was well positioned to notice the effects of deindustrialization. We found this article about Boggs worth reading.

The image for this episode is a photograph of the abandoned Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, taken by Thomas Hawk on 13 June 2010. The image is posted of Flickr under a creative commons attribution non-commercial license. Lauren Berlant describes gives this photograph as a bad image of neoliberalism, which allows our social theory to derive “its urgency and its reparative imaginary from spaces of catastrophe and risk where the exemplum represents structural failure” (“The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times” Society and Space 34 no. 3 (2016) p.395). But I like it. Saronik modified the original image.

Music used in promotional material: ‘Shadow of a Coal Mine’ by Linda Draper

Tagged : capitalism / deindustrialization / economics / history of capitalism / history of labor / labor studies / medical humanities

Alienation

by webwitchMarch 21, 2021May 18, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

In this episode Kim talks with Mustafa Yavas about Alienation.

Mustafa quotes Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. He also references Albert Camus’ books The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, and Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times. Towards the end of the episode, he mentions Bertrand Russell’s 1930 article “In Praise of Idleness.”

For listeners interested in reading more on alienation, he recommends Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization; David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and Rahel Jaeggi’s Alienation. He also suggests three great movies that dwell on the subject: Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann; Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, and Tolga Karacelik’s Toll Booth.

Mustafa is a postdoctoral scholar in sociology at NYU Abu Dhabi, where he works on work! He is writing a book called White Collar Blues about the transnational Turkish middle class, for which he has recently completed a brilliant book proposal (editors take note!). His previous research focused on boundary processes in social, economic, and political settings, including status homophily in social networks, residential segregation by income, and collective identity formation in social movements.

This week’s image is a 1920 painting of Sisyphus at his futile labor by Franz Stuck. Available on Wikimedia Commons.

Tagged : Blue Collar / Corporate / labor politics / labor studies / Marxism / White Collar / Work / Workplace