Advanced Studies
Futures of Sustainability
Photo: UHH/Denstorf
7 April 2021
The pandemic and climate change both force us to pose the question: What labour must be suspended to avoid disaster and what labour must continue? In the years to come, the debate about green transition will continue to intensify the question of the abolition or transformation of carbon jobs, and the character of work in an ecological transition. Many terms have already been proposed to navigate such a shift: “green jobs”, “reproductive labour”, “essential work”, “earthcare labour”, “hybrid labour”, “meta-industrial labour” vs. “brown jobs”, “carbon jobs”, “toxic work”, or “batshit jobs”.
This workshop aims to bring into conversation and critically analyse various approaches to the problem of concrete labour in times of climate change and eco-system breakdown. In doing so, we aim to move beyond the tendency to consider labour only in its quantitative aspects be it in terms of productivity and wage levels, or the length of the working day and the rate of exploitation.
Shifting our attention to concrete labour, we move towards questions of the content of different kinds of labour, the refusal or affirmation of types of work, of ecological transition or abolition of jobs, and of political control over production. The aim of this workshop is both theoretical/analytical and practical: to explore the problem of concrete labour, and to ask what this problem means for ecological-, climate-, and labour environmentalist strategy.
This workshop explores question such as:
- How to deal with labour’s essential role in facilitating the economic processes that drive climate change and eco-system breakdown?
- What kinds of labour can facilitate a non-catastrophic metabolism with non-human nature?
- How does the critique of concrete labour transform the critique of political economy?
- How to navigate the tension between work dependency, pride in work, and the need for certain types of work to be abolished?
Program:
10.30 a.m.: Introduction: Ecological crisis and the question of concrete labour
11.00 a.m. -12.30 p.m.: Trade union environmentalism: Limitations and possibilities
Nora Räthzel (Umeå University, Sweden): Alienation, Producer’s Pride and the Labour-Nature Relationship
Ulrich Brand (Vienna University, Austria): The imperial mode of living and dilemmas of organised labour
12.30-1.15 p.m. Lunch break
1.15-2.45 p.m.: Transition and social reproduction
Emanuele Leonardi (University of Coimbra, Portugal): For a political genealogy of the question concerning the environment
Stefania Barca (Uppsala University, Sweden): From Wages for Housework to Care Income 'for people and planet': long-term developments in the feminist 'refusal of work'
2.45.-3.00 p.m.: Break
3.00-4.30 p.m.: The labour of sustenance and repair
Max Ajl (Wageningen University, Netherlands): What kind of value? Agroecology & the labor of socialist transition
Alyssa Battistoni (Harvard University, USA): Labor of life: resonance and tension in ecological & feminist theories of labor
4.35-5.00 p.m.: Final remarks, future collaborations
The Workshop is hosted by Bue Rübner Hansen (Jena University, Germany) and Manuela Zechner (Jena University, Germany)
Registration is open: The Workshop will be held in English via Zoom.
If you would like to participate, please register by sending an e-mail to zukuenfte.der.nachhaltigkeit"AT"uni-hamburg.de
Registered participants will receive further information and the Zoom access details shortly before the Workshop.