department of shameless plugs

Oh, hey, so my first published work as an academic, "The limits of work and the subject of labor history," appears in the brand new book Rethinking U.S. Labor History from Continuum Press.  My essay looks at the racialized and gendered applicability of the term "labor" as a descriptor for selective human activities, and argues that two projects labor scholars should take up are the continual reexamination of both the shifting geography of the boundaries between work and not work and a corresponding shift in who or what ought to be the privileged subject(s) of labor history.  I think my original draft was rather awful, and I think that the revisions process and intervening year and a half have convinced me that the finished project is significantly less awful, though you are of course welcome to disagree, and if folks who read it want to engage me on it, I'd welcome that, though I'm finding the temporality of publishing somewhat disorienting - i submitted the final draft of the essay 15 months ago and have been working on other projects since - a conference paper here, a diss chapter there, and hadn't really thought much about this essay in the interrim until i realized i needed to be able to say stuff about it for a panel Wednesday night.  I should also note that the other essays in the book that I've read are really interesting, especially Dan Bender's article on the senses and the cultural turn.  I'm also looking forward to reading the essay on home health care workers by Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein.

Today's November 20th.  That makes it the 1 year anniversary of this: At a moment in which the UCPD is pulling guns on protestors, academic neoliberalism continues expansionist coloniality at home and abroad and neoliberal assaults on campus workers, students, and spaces, we need to be inspired by and learn from the struggles of the last two years as we work to build new cycles of whatever. I meant that less in the agamben sense than in the "insert your radical noun here" sense, "insurrection, insurgency, transformation, strikes, resistance, organizing, etc."  They're all problematic and insufficient in one way or another, but also all necessary in one way or another.  Alright.  Solidarity from the purple tendrils of the global network university