Drawing on methods ranging from philosophy to ethnography to politics, this panel will address problems at the intersection of affect and work. 

Drawing on her ethnographic fieldwork with immigrant nurses in Toronto, anthropologist Lalaie Ameeriar (author of Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora) will discuss pedagogies of affect in job training, arguing that teaching Western notions of docility and deference to women workers reproduces a racialized notion of femininity. 

Political theorist Kathi Weeks (author of The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries) will present “Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work,” a paper comprising new research on love and happiness in popular management discourses. 

Philosopher Shiloh Whitney will critique the use of authenticity as a framework for analyzing affective labor, suggesting instead a notion of affective agency that allows us to rethink emotions outside of the binary of sovereign and spontaneous versus forced or feigned. 

These presentations will be followed by a conversation moderated by Kaegan Sparks, PhD student, Art History, and curator of Soft Skills, on view at the James Gallery from April 14 through June 5, 2017.