Book review symposium: Response to Reviewers of Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

Patch‐work: The economic and moral complementarity of informal entrepreneurs' multiple projects in Congo‐Brazzaville

“…While classic studies of work often see it through class, the recent wave of reflection on work tends to examine work itself or the lack thereof (Choi et al, 2020; Ferguson, 2015, 2019; Ferguson & Li, 2018; Gershon, 2017; Graeber, 2018; Lane, 2011; Mains, 2012; Standing, 2014; Weeks, 2011; World Bank, 2012, 2019). Kathi Weeks (2011, 18), for example, explicitly focuses on the everyday experiences of work because this perspective can accommodate other forms of inequality and reveal the political and social process of class formation.…”

“…While classic studies of work often see it through class, the recent wave of reflection on work tends to examine work itself or the lack thereof (Choi et al, 2020; Ferguson, 2015, 2019; Ferguson & Li, 2018; Gershon, 2017; Graeber, 2018; Lane, 2011; Mains, 2012; Standing, 2014; Weeks, 2011; World Bank, 2012, 2019). Kathi Weeks (2011, 18), for example, explicitly focuses on the everyday experiences of work because this perspective can accommodate other forms of inequality and reveal the political and social process of class formation. In this trend of inquiries on work, two interrelated yet different directions emerge: one examines the rise and experiences of precarious life in un‐ or underemployment (Han, 2018; Kwon & Lane, 2016; Standing, 2014), while the other highlights the historicity of formal employment and asks what comes after work (Ferguson, 2015, 2019; Ferguson & Li, 2018; Graeber, 2018).…”

Re-futuring creative economies: beyond bad dreams and the banal imagination

“…The creative economies of tomorrow might serve us better if they drew more on heterodox, feminist and ecological social and economic thought -where production is not imagined as a limitless and empty abstraction, but more concretely understood in the context of different human (and non-human) needs, and connected to the ongoing obligations, contradictions and challenges of our shared social and ecological reproduction. Such a holistic perspective might help inform the creation of worlds of cultural production, circulation and exchange that focus less on GDP and 'sustainable development' and more on sustainable prosperityworlds where human (and non-human) well-being can finally be disassociated from crude, economistic formulas (Jackson, 2017, Weeks, 2011. In re-futuring we might also find licence to engage in the kind of genuine 'open thinking' (and I mean more in the sense of a Theodor Adorno or a Donna Haraway rather than a Google or Facebook) that allows to move outside of the accepted and banal discourse on creative economy and posit for alternative or transitional creative economies, ways of being and provisioning in the cultural sphere that take seriously the need for progressive and egalitarian change, in all social domains.…”

The Productivity of Unemployment and the Temporality of Employment-to-Come: Older Disadvantaged Job Seekers

“…The usefulness of Adkins’ explication is advancing a relational understanding of employment/unemployment in which the two are not binary states, but are intercontextual. Thus, ‘work is crucial’ to ‘those who are expelled or excluded from it’ (Weeks, 2011: 2), but not just because it is held as a marker of ‘productive’ and ‘good’ citizenship to which one ought to aspire. It is also crucial because the conditions, meanings, practices, and cultures of employment and unemployment are deeply connected and interrelated.…”