How is the exploitation of wage labor within capitalist economies connected to doing gender and doing nature? And how are gendered and racialized forms of doing and working outside of capitalist production nevertheless related to capitalist accumulation?
In this course, students have the chance to examine five cases of labor/work, located at the center as well as the margins of capitalism. We will explore how the organization of these activities contributes to gendered and racialized society-nature-relations. This course is for students interested in current research in political economy and critical social theory. We will start from the insight that capitalism is not only a system of accumulation taking place in the formal economy; it also entails different sorts of making use of non-formal types of labor/work and the natural environment. Through the analysis of case studies, we deliberately look beyond formal employment relations and the relationship between workers and 'capital' to examine capitalism as a dependent mode of production – dependent on and interacting with its outside.
The seminar will engage with five sites of labor/work in which society and nature interact: extraction, production, social reproduction, consumption, and waste handling. Regarding the realm of extraction, students will study images of masculinity related to working in Canada's fracking industry. In the area of production, we will look at the example of the cut flower industry in Colombia, particularly the working conditions of women in this sector. The realm of social reproduction is examined via the case of surrogacy. The area of consumption is foregrounded in a case study of household waste separation activities. The last case analyses the working conditions of sanitation workers and explores waste (handling) as a key topic for political economy. |
