Labors of Love: Lalaie Ameeriar, Kathi Weeks, Shiloh Whitney
Fri, Apr 28, 2017
6:00 PM–8:30 PM
The Skylight Room (9100)
![](https://centerforthehumanities.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/4.28_Labors-of-Love_Bjelic.jpg)
This panel brings together scholars from the fields of anthropology, gender studies, and philosophy to 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 women workers Western notions of docility and deference reproduces a racialized notion of gendered labor.
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.
The event will be livestreamed. Click here at 6:00pm to view.
Cosponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the PhD Program in Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY.
https://vimeo.com/215660646