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