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Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles

American Graphic Design in the 1990s: Deindustrialization and the Death of the Author

This essay offers an account of one profession’s attempt to come to terms with the meaning of work in a context of economic and technological flux. Bound from the beginning…

Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles

Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles

TV and Tipworkification

Contemporary TV demonstrates a conspicuous interest in two related kinds of employment: tipwork (waiting tables, bartending, making espressos) and the more recent form of work termed “gigwork” (temporary, project-based freelance…

Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles

The Effective Turn: Affect, Gender, and the Wages of the Labor Film

No observer of contemporary American economic life can overlook the fact that real wages have remained almost unchanged for over forty years.1 Stagnant wages seemingly scandalize liberal platitudes of progress….

Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles

Character, Genre, Labor: The Office Novel after Deindustrialization

“Minor characters,” writes Alex Woloch, “are the proletariat of the novel.”1 Defined entirely by the functional role they play — gardener, maid, or mechanic — they are never treated to…

Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles

Introduction: The Spirit of Capital in an Age of Deindustrialization

Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic famously seeks out what he terms a “spirit of capitalism” in the development of “duty in a calling.” For Weber, the peculiarly unfulfilling experience of…

Contemporaries Essays

My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, January 4

Greenpoint, NY Dear friends, It is, he claims—all of it—a marriage fight. Call it marital realism, a demon released by the couple form. Call it a gaslight novel. Linda projected…

Contemporaries Essays

My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, January 2

Toronto, Ontario, Canada It does no good to write autobiographical fiction cause the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death…

Contemporaries Essays, Interviews

Contemporaries Essays

Intergenerational Feminist: A Conversation with Jamia Wilson

Jamia Wilson began her career as a nonprofit leader by doing campus outreach and action-fund coordination for Planned Parenthood. She has since served as Vice President of Programs at the…