Commoning Precarity: No Work, Refusal, Autonomy

Commoning Precarity: No Work, Refusal, Autonomy

Friday, May 10-Saturday, May 11
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Today precarity, a life without any guaranteed work, is becoming the condition of millions of people worldwide. The conference focuses on the social and affective costs of precarity, but also on what possibilities it may open. Can we think of precarity as more than a form of neoliberal governance, and rather see it as a means of insurgent politics, aimed at reclaiming the common? How can the Autonomists’ idea of the refusal of work help us rethink precarity in the present moment?
Speakers will include Kathi Weeks, (Women’s Studies, Duke University), R.Radhakrishnan, (Comparative Literature, UC Irvine), Douglas Kellner (Education,UCLA), and George Caffentzis (Philoshophy, University of Southern Maine). Moroccan filmmaker Leila Kilani will be screen and discuss her new film “On The Edge”.

Sponsored by the UCHRI, the IHC, COMMA, the Center on Modern Culture, Materialism and Aesthetics, the Dept. of English,  the Comparative Literature Program, the Center for the Middle East, the Dept. of Art History and History of Architecture, and the Dept. of Film and Media Studies.