Rethinking Work

Rethinking Work will consider the changing spaces, temporalities and legalities of employment and how these alter conceptions, expectation and practices of work and worker relations to the broader economy. If work (increasingly) includes activities at the margins of or beyond ‘formal’ economic practices, this opens up a range of empirical and theoretical possibilities concerning the nature of such labour, and how this plural but largely precarious kind of work is reconfiguring the economy. Therefore, the group will bring together a diversity of approaches to work, drawing from both the Global North and South, and from a variety of occupations including labour that may be considered illegal, vulnerable, informal, and unpaid. The activities of the group are organized into four themes (Negotiating law and work; Vulnerable work; Informal and Precarious Labour; Unpaid work) each of which will involve two sessions. One will be a more formal event with a panel of (three) invited speakers and the other an informal event to follow two weeks later orientated around readings and discussion carried over from the first session.