[Air-L] AAA 2012 CfP: Beyond Work

[Sareeta Amrute]

I am currently organizing a panel on life beyond/after/adjacent to work for the AAA Meeting that will be in San Francisco this year. Please see the call for papers below. Interested parties should submit an abstract to me no later than April 1, 2012

Thanks,
Sareeta Amrute
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Washington
sareeta.amrute at gmail.com


Beyond Work

The concern with work and its expansiveness has in recent years come to occupy critical thought as work seems increasingly to have colonized free time, to look like entertainment, and blur the boundary between productive activity and rest. This panel asks, is it now time to re-imagine work, un-work, and areas of life beyond work? What kinds of new problematizations emerge at the intersection of working lives and lives beyond work? What are the dimensions through which work is understood, critiqued, and reappropriated? How does the value of work change when viewed from the perspective of the family, the marginalized, or the openly resistant? This panel will explore the emergence of alternatives to the expansion of work at the same time that it considers the consequences of valuing work as a measure of life. We will explore the after-life of work in its multiple dimensions, such as work and the biological rhythms of sleep, the relationship between working life and lively flour!
 ishing, the spaces, dreams, and times that exist outside of work economies, and the relationship between entertainment technologies and the social imaginaries of un-working. We will investigate how the spaces around, after, and before work are being reconceptualized in light of the failures of economic models of hard work. We will explore unorthodox forms of life after work, and ask how the organization of work is linked and de-coupled from the organization of life.