John R. Palandech was a well-known immigrant publisher, politician, and entrepreneur in Chicago from the Gilded Age to the post–World War II era. This article retraces his biography and crosses it with the transatlantic political, cultural, and economic world Palandech was a part of and actor in. At the core of this study is a collection of l…[Read more]

People’s relationships to paid work are many and varied. For some it is an important indicator of their identity, while for others it is a form of inescapable drudgery, boredom, or a place of exploitation. For those under- and unemployed, this unbearable state of boredom might itself be an aspiration. Current literature on queer identities and…[Read more]

This is a lecture course for upper-level undergraduates, and is offered in English through the French department. It is designed for 50-60 students, with 30 hours of grading assistance.

This article is concerned with the popular imaginaries associated with internships and
unpaid labour and their implications for emerging subjectivities and conceptualisations of
work. It draws on a comparative analysis of three prime-time television series about young
women’s experiences of their first entry in the world or work. By analysing t…[Read more]

Collective article by Precarious Workers Brigade and Carrot Workers Collective. In: Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity. Edited by Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa, Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Szreder.

The rapid development and adoption of technological care equipment for remote monitoring, self-diagnosis and other forms of telemedicine risks splitting care work: on the one hand, well-paid professionals developing or operating new technologies; on the other, much poorer and much less qualified assistants to take care of the operations that are…[Read more]

This week the Indonesian presidential election has been a contest between the incumbent Jokowi, who has promised an ambitious programme of agrarian reform, and the descendent of the military dictator Suharto. In this article, Frans Ari Prasetyo exposes the contradictions of the Jokowi government’s dependence on the World Bank and local c…[Read more]

Media workers have always adopted branding tactics for themselves: creating and managing a certain persona, doing the emotional labour necessary in largely informal and reputation-driven working environments to suggest a persona, performing this identity dutifully in order to make it work. However, branding is not an inevitable practice — it is…[Read more]

Social practices and contingencies always exceed the neoliberal models by which people currently try to contain
the inherent unpredictability of accomplishing social tasks with others, such as getting a job. Contradictions in
neoliberal logics emerge when people try to live according to neoliberal precepts, engaging with other social…[Read more]

In his 1846 history-from-below, Le Peuple, Michelet presents himself as the embodiment of the history of France in order to reach beyond the discursive and effect social change. Unlike in many of his other histories, where an allegory of the body is used in the service of an overarching national or political narrative, the body in Le Peuple is…[Read more]

Dieser Aufsatz wartet mit einigen wahrscheinlich unerwarteten Thesen1auf:• Der rassistische Diskurs in den österreichischen Medien, wie wir ihn heute kennen, hatsich nicht schon von Anbeginn der Arbeitsmigration nach Österreich in den 1960er und70erJahren entwickelt. Er ist ein Produkt der 80erJahre.•In den 1960er und 1970erJahren herrschte ein p…[Read more]

This engagement highlights the antagonism between wealth and the commodity value form posed at the heart of Marx’s work. In doing so, it considers methodological possibilities for both understanding and intervening in the fabricating of new alienated capitalist values from beyond-human natures.

History of the “racial reconciliation” staged by building trades unions and President Richard Nixon, through which building trades union leaders taught Nixon how to reach out to organized labor and the white working class for the 1972 election in exchange for the President withdrawing his support for affirmative action in the construction industry.

A history of the first two years of the United Construction Workers Association (UCWA) in Seattle, Washington, and its struggle to represent black workers entering the construction industry under court order separately from organized labor and employers.

In the contemporary U.S. workplace, corporate personhood is increasingly becoming
the metaphor structuring how job seekers are supposed to present themselves as
employable. If one takes oneself to be a business, one should also take oneself to
be an entity that requires a brand. Some ethnographic questions arise when job
seekers try to embody…[Read more]

While a fundamental axiom in economics is that consumers act rationally, maximizing their utility by obeying the law of demand, it has become increasingly recognized that these individuals may make irrational decisions in situations of influence. As not all consumers have the same rationality, this study aimed to identify specific consumer…[Read more]