The combination of “care” and precarity has allowed for the formation of an underpaid and disposable workforce. Understood as doing it for the love of the job, undervalued workers are forced to comply to exploitative conditions. This is particularly visible in the arts and in academia, and disproportionally impacts women. While this appears to be a novel condition, a global perspective shows that precariousness has historically been the norm. The outsourcing of domestic labour to non-white women and the conditions facing migrant workers are but two examples of precarity’s roots in both capital’s gender-essentialism and colonialism’s cyclical creation of a “reserve army of labour” (Marx) excluded from, or only periodically included in the wage relation. This panel invites contributions by artists and scholars whose work engages with issues pertaining to care, labour, and precarity and hopes to address the conditions their entanglement creates from a range of perspectives.

Session Chair: Vanessa Parent, [email protected]

Submissions should include: 

• the name, email address, institutional affiliation and rank of the applicant
• title of the proposal
• a proposal of 300 words maximum
• a brief biography (150 words maximum)

Please use the submission form available at https://uaac-aauc.com/conference/