Affective Labor

Exploitation is still an essential analytical category to understand capitalism and its most recent transformations. However, the same concept should be profoundly reconsidered and updated. In this article the author attempts, in this regard, to contaminate the Marxian theoretical perspective on the exploitation with Deleuze and Guattari's analysis, as they proposed in their works about capitalism and schizophrenia. In particular, what is being argued is the necessity of reading the exploitation in the contemporary capitalism according to a operative double logic: on the one hand a dialectic logic based on the subsumption of labour to capital (but less and less relevant), on the other a axiomatic logic based on the impression of the subjectivity to capital (instead increasingly relevant). The functional relationships between these two different logics of capitalism have to be continually mended and integrated together and, just for this reason, they are, eventually, here identified as the space of fragility of the contemporary capitalist system.

Mika Rottenberg’s video installation Cheese examines the relationship between production and biological reproduction, challenging the notion that they can be easily separated as Western political theory suggests. The installation highlights physical processes such as hair growth and lactation, which cannot be halted like labour. This paper analyses the production relations of milk from a materialist and feminist perspective, focusing on actors and practices. It argues that the video stages them as hyper-feminine, avoiding any didactic content on veganism, anti-speciesism or feminism.

Much scholarly and popular ink has been spilled in debates regarding whether contemporary Chinese economic investments in Africa constitute a “New Chinese Empire.” Focusing on macrolevel politics and state-to-state relations, both sides of this debate tend to ignore the everyday lived realities of Chinese migrants and local Africans. In this article, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at Chinese-operated mining enterprises in rural Zambia, I analyze intersecting inequalities of class, race, and gender that structure intimate relationships between Zambian women and Chinese men. The constraints on women’s agency that emerge when such relationships end are enmeshed within the wider structural disparities between Zambia and China today. These disparities result as much from the institutional policies of the Chinese state and state-owned enterprises as they do from the behavior of individual Chinese men. Deconstructing official narratives, I demonstrate how these policies operate as a form of “South-South” capitalist extractive patriarchy. [gender, racial capitalism, colonialism, constrained agency, affective labor]

This article explores the making of two branded Spotify playlists to critique the concept of 'affective labor.' Over the last few decades, scholars have argued that social media users and creative industries workers alike are engaged in a new type of labor, affective labor, which generates economic value for companies. The article challenges this framing. Drawing on Marxist concepts of productive and unproductive labor, in addition to feminist social reproduction theory, it details playlists made for Motorola phones and Itaú bank by paid contractors. It situates the role of these playlists, as part of advertising campaigns, within the broader circuits of capital, showing how both paid and unpaid playlisting are unproductive labor, and therefore do not produce surplus value. The playlists do, however, assist in the overall reproduction of capitalism, particularly through the commodification of labor power. The article argues that characterizing musical production involving affect, especially online, as 'affective labor' hampers our ability to understand affect within the production and reproduction of social relations within capitalism. It contends that a key political question of affect is not only the production of subjectivities, but the conversion of affectively dense, social values into commodified labor controlled by capital. Affective politics is when affects are literally put to work.

This chapter conducts a case study of Li Ziqi 李子柒 (1990-) to examine the role of a fective labour and the construction of authenticity in the context of China's in uencer culture. It argues that Li enacts cooking as a form of a fective labour that resonates with her followers' own affective needs, social values, and aspirations. The chapter also analyses the Chinese state's interactions with grassroots content producers such as Li Ziqi. It shows how the perceived authenticity of her persona and content is redirected by state media to address domestic issues (such as revitalising rural areas and promoting values of economic neoliberalism) and to present an attractive image of China to international audiences.

This paper demonstrates that women's affective labor was widely and deeply appropriated in the Red Army's war propaganda in the early 1930s. This appropriation allowed women to emerge as free humans, visible social producers, empowered political subjects, significant war participants, and active shapers of history on an unprecedented scale in Chinese history. The selected cases examined in this paper are drawn from the songs, plays, and posters employed in the Red Army's war propaganda of the early 1930s. By highlighting the recurrent symbols of women's affective labor in these rudimentary yet innovative examples of wartime propaganda, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of the complex and dialogic messages regarding women's contribution to social production and reproduction conveyed through the Red Army's propaganda. Additionally, this paper explores the liberating potential of gendered affective labor as a non-capitalist concept.

In this article, the authors mobilize the concept of affective ambiguity in order to explore the epistemological and structural incompatibilities that collaboration implies in the context of the highly asymmetrical relationships of power within and beyond neoliberal academia. They show that collaborations between university-based anthropologists at different stages of their careers and the groups and communities they seek to collaborate with are governed by mutually contradictory value frameworks. These value frameworks are shaped by the structural inequalities of these constellations and by diverging temporalities, socialities, and expectations that tend to make such collaborations unsustainable. Drawing on their own involvement in Kollektiv Polylog, a collective of refugee women, lecturers, former students, and activists in and beyond Berlin that are working together in the context of various publication, teaching, and video projects, the authors highlight the affective, temporal, and material resources that all actors need to invest in order to make collaboration productive.

 Partiendo de la reflexión teórica que procura hacer una distinción de la noche como algo más que un ciclo natural, considerándola una configuración socio espacial y temporal, cargada por la subjetividad de todos los que participan en ella, así como de estructuras culturales y relacionales; articulándola desde lo laboral, se propone analizarla desde dos facciones sumamente interconectadas: noctis y nocturnidad.Centrando la propuesta de este artículo en la nocturnidad; mediante el estudio etnográfico de las características siu generis del trabajo de producción de interacciones realizado por meseros y meseras en espacios semi privados de venta y consumo de alcohol en dos subconjuntos de bares de la Ciudad de México, se conceptualiza a dicha actividad como un trabajo no clásico de producción de nocturnidad.Más adelante, se presentan las consideraciones y adaptaciones a las técnicas y estrategias de investigación utilizadas, además de los desafíos éticos y prácticos que se generan en la...

En este texto nos disponemos a reflexionar sobre las ideas de trabajo inmaterial y trabajo afectivo con las que trabaja Silvia Federici en “Revolución en punto cero”, explorando sus vínculos con el trabajo reproductivo y relacionándolos con el arte. Haremos un recorrido por diferentes aspectos del trabajo afectivo (paralelo en muchos
casos -aunque no siempre- al trabajo inmaterial), estableciendo paralelismos entre trabajos reproductivos y artísticos sin reivindicar su equivalencia, pero permitiendo que se solapen el universo de la reproducción sexual y el universo de la producción cultural.

This article considers how Patrice Rushen's jazz-funk album, Shout It Out (1977), implicitly works as a punctum that indexes the irreconcilable relationship between black women's affectability and black women musicians' transgressive sonic praxis. Consequently, I consider how Rushen's use of sound technologies (i.e., multitracking, the clavinet) on Shout It Out attempts to reorient black women's affective and material labor to the end of sounding black women musician's multifaceted genius. As polyphonist, Rushen speaks to the expropriation of black women's affective and material labor and the vexed relationship black women musicians have with musical traditions and industries. "Jazz for a long time, ya know, was a very, very, very much a man's game and the women were singers."-Patrice Rushen "But neither her height nor the fact that she is a woman in a traditionally male oriented business has deterred her."-Marsha Lynn Smith Most famously known for her R&B grooves like "Forget Me Nots," Patrice Rushen's musical career began when she won a solo piano competition at the Monterey Jazz Festival of 1972. By the age of 19, Rushen was offered record deal by jazz record label, Prestige Records. As a classically trained piano player, her earliest work housed itself in a straightforward jazz market. Indicative of her time while signed to Prestige, Rushen, "was gonna be allowed to do [her] own music. And [she] had all this creative control" ("Patrice Rushen"). Given such a rare opportunity, Rushen would become a bandleader for her albums released on Prestige and would master making a room full of jazzmen follow her lead. For example, jazz-funk heavyweights like Joe Henderson were featured on her first release on Prestige, titled Prelusion (1974). Evolving as an artist by way of her creative control while signed to Prestige, she would feel free to begin to fuse the sounds of black popular music with the sounds of straightforward jazz. The amalgamation of these two sounds became known in the popular domain as jazz-funk. But ultimately, jazz purists critiqued Rushen's use of black popular music forms and styles in her music. She would eventually sign to popular record labels like Elektra in 1978 and Arista in the mid-1980s, but still found herself trapped by normative ideals about the role of black women musicians in the music industry. Facing the fate of many black women musicians, the US music market attempted to

Through a discussion of the articles in this collection, the introduction explores the ways in which the inhabitations of liberalisation require and necessitate intensive self-fashioning from citizens. We call this protracted work on the self, which unsettles enduring pathways of social reproduction and avenues of social mobility, pedagogies of aspiration. Moving beyond debates about efficient markets versus a redistributive state as the ideal provider of education, we suggest that ethnographic inquiries that foreground the everyday experiences and stakes of fashioning aspirational selves in educational contexts help us understand the lived realities of democratic possibility in liberalising India today.

This article examines two different cases or “events” in Twitter to understand the role that negative emotions play in online discussions of academic labor. As academic labor conditions deteriorate and academics take to online spaces, they do so to critique, connect, and organize. We suggest that negative emotions may play a productive role in raising awareness of labor issues, as well as serving as a site for organizing across academic hierarchies and beyond the university. Additionally, negative emotions may fuel the production of new networks, personal, and professional connections. However, as we show, anger online can also provoke substantive repercussions, both personally and institutionally. We suggest that paying attention to the role that negative emotions play on Twitter can help academics gain a better sense of how to use their digital labor for collective action.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

Author(s): Hickman, Louise | Advisor(s): Serlin, David H | Abstract: Curating Accessible Infrastructure investigates the cultural politics of real-time transcription for deaf and hard of hearing students in the academic classroom. I analyze how d/Deaf and hard of hearing students maintain access to spoken speech through the transcriptive labor produced by a stenographer’s engagement with assistive technologies. Rather than think of access as a set of pre-established conditions, this dissertation project seeks to understand access as an historical event and mode of political production. To interpret access through this broader understanding, I undertake case study analyses of real-time captioning practices as supported by stenographic technologies, and examine how the production of real-time captioning and access more broadly requires distributed, embodied, and social labor. These processes, when studied together, reveal formations of access that are bound by their relation to what I...

comprehensive-migration-management (accessed 02.02.2010). The hierarchy of decisions, the necessary division of labour between policy, legislation and administration, and the depiction of migration as a manageable process is clear for the IOM in their guidelines: The top level refers to the policy, legislation, and administrative organization that make it possible to manage migration at a governmental level. These components of the model produce the principles, directions, and commitments that define the four main areas of migration management. While four key areas of migration management can be identified, they are linked by the numerous cross-cutting issues and activities that address one or more of the main management areas [ibid.]. What are called the 'Four Main Areas of Migration Management' can be read as the four main areas of problematization of migration. These will be discussed in turn. Development The first area, development, underlines the general sense of something out of control-something that needs to be 'harnessed' and points to an issue which emerged as a policy field Managing Migration: A Conceptual Framework 16 linked to migration parallel with the emergence of the concept of migration management. Hence: The goal of managing migration and development is to help harness the development potential of migration for individual migrants and societies (ibid.). This formulation indicates that someone is apparently in need of help in order to maximize their 'development potential'. Without going further into to the discourse of 'development and migration nexus' it should be mentioned here that 'development' is framed around a specific understanding of global inequality and the opportunities of a globalized market and a globalized economy. Most often, development embraces both the economic potential of the remittances sent to families and networks in the Global South by migrants working in Global North countries, and the transnational networks and families of Global South citizens with their family members who are working outside their country of origin. 'Development' plays a crucial role in the construction of the migrant labour market as a 'winwin situation' for both the sending and receiving countries. The 'win' can be in terms of more income, increased skills, or of some other kind. The following three areas are about regular migration, irregular migration and 'return' or replacement of migrants: A list of regular, legal, deserving migrants is presented in the area of 'facilitating' as those whose mobility is to be improved, safeguarded and taken care of: Facilitating The goal of facilitating migration is to safeguard and improve the ability of workers, professionals, students, trainees, families, tourists, and others to move safely and efficiently between countries with minimal delay and with proper authorization'(ibid.). 1. Placing international migration on the global agenda. 10 http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=margin accessed 06102010 11 ('margin noun' The Oxford Dictionary of English (revised edition).

Reports from integrative researchers who have followed calls for sociotechnical integration emphasize that the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration to inflect the social shaping of technoscience is often constrained by their liminal position. Integrative researchers tend to be positioned as either adversarial outsiders or co-opted insiders. In an attempt to navigate these dynamics, we show that attending to affective disturbances can open up possibilities for productive engagements across disciplinary divides. Drawing on the work of Helen Verran, we analyze “disconcertment” in three sociotechnical integration research studies. We develop a heuristic that weaves together disconcertment, affective labor, and responsivity to analyze the role of the body in interdisciplinary collaborations. We draw out how bodies do affective labor when generating responsivity between collaborators in moments of disconcertment. Responsive bodies can function as sensors, sources, and processors o...

Revisiting data from a sociolinguistic ethnography of an in-bound Swiss call centre (2010-2011), I will show how the scripted smile of agents is fused strategically with the use of the dialect in order to produce 'affective-discursive practices' that aim for a projection of quality of service. These practices include 'scripted affective efficiency' and the 'stylization of Swiss authenticity'. Inherently embedded in and emblematic of the political economy, these particular affectivediscursive practices are conducive to the company's branding strategies of authenticity, directly linked to market distinction and profit generation. From today's standpoint, i.e. 10 years later, transformations in ICT (Information and Communications Technology) have displayed the limits of these affective practices and their underlying discourses and ideologies in the face of cost-benefit analyses when the number of incoming calls dwindled due to the development of smartphones. This paper will discuss affective-discursive practices from a politicaleconomic and critical sociolinguistic perspective.

En este capítulo considero los hogares que emplean trabajadoras domésticas como un espacio de encuentros compulsivos, como un sitio
donde convergen mujeres de diferentes orígenes y clases sociales
que comparten expectativas en torno al trabajo doméstico, experimentando
una proximidad física que sería inusual en otra situación, y que vuelve más perceptible la distancia social prevaleciente entre ellas. En especial me interesa el nexo entre las relaciones conviviales y las asimetrías de poder que caracterizan a esta relación laboral. Apoyándome en el concepto de convivialidad acuñado por Mecila,  me propongo poner de relieve las “formas de vivir juntos en contextos caracterizados por profundas desigualdades,
así como persistentes tensiones interculturales, interreligiosas, interétnicas y de género” (Mecila, 2017, p. 2). Aquí sostengo que los hogares que contratan
trabajadoras domésticas son un sitio privilegiado para observar interacciones, negociaciones y disputas cotidianas que conciernen
a las desigualdades sociales, y por ende son un contexto clave para
estudiar la constitución recíproca entre convivialidad y desigualdad
(Costa, 2019).

Shiloh Whitney writes: “[s]he works to cultivate the affect she displays in her postures and gestures such that it is not quarantined on her bodily surfaces but takes root in the proverbial ‘gut,’” but I ask: what if it is in the literal gut? If we take seriously the ways that affective labor shapes the production of subjectivity, why wouldn’t it shape the production of physiological habits? In this paper, I examine the interactions between affective labor and gastrointestinal health through female embodiment. I argue that, to an extent, the affective labor of women influences their embodiment and that this embodiment then causes the gastrointestinal disorders that are prevalent in women. I begin with discussing Affective Labor and how negative affects are “dumped” on certain bodies, women in my analysis, and how the recipient then absorbs these affects. This results in a management of “unwanted” or “waste” affects, which I develop from Shiloh Whitney. I then give an account of functional gastrointestinal disorders to demonstrate the prevalence of disorders in women. Finally, I end by exploring the interactions between gastrointestinal health and affective labor through embodiment, looking at female tightness, affective indigestion, and gastrointestinal actions. Much of my connections are more theoretical, but points to areas that are deserving of future research.

the socialist states. Just as importantly, race and ethnicity are key to understanding the social changes initiated by the post-1989 and post-1991 'transformations' that lead to massive displacement of racialised communities. Ultimately, this omission helps to reinforce the ideology of European racelessness (El-Tayeb). This book aspires to accomplish an intervention that no single volume can do. And this ambition is in fact another of its considerable achievements as it opens up avenues of thought and questions with which scholars will undoubtedly engage with in future work. As such, despite its limits, Disability in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union makes very clear how productive and generative the critical dialogues between disability studies and Eastern European studies can be and why we need more of them. The book genuinely enhances ways of thinking and theorising disability by extending our knowledge of how contexts, economic structures, political frameworks, ideological structures and social formations shape disability and its intersections.

The progressive deployment of market-oriented regulatory frameworks in mass Higher Education Institutions (MHEI hereafter) triggered, in a wide variety of forms and degrees, the application of Knowledge Management principles in MHEI. This means the application of the knowledge 'codification strategy', where the focus is on the economies of the re-use of centrally developed knowledge through codifying, storing and distributing knowledge. This process however, presents significant challenges. Both knowledge and non-knowledge related aspects might constrain the application of knowledge codification strategies in MHEI. The aim of this paper is to better understand the application of knowledge codification strategies in MHEI, from a knowledge management perspective. This is done by examining the use of course outlines as the critical means to 'transfer' codified knowledge. The research site was a MHEI that explicitly followed a 'codification strategy', where the profits come from the economies of scale and low cost operation. Research findings point out mixed outcomes. The set of cost-saving managerial-oriented initiatives together with the deployment of knowledge codification strategies simultaneously supported the knowledge transfer of codified-oriented courses associated to low levels of tacit knowledge and constrained knowledge transfer of codified-oriented courses associated with slightly higher levels of tacit knowledge. This finding can be credited to a set of both knowledge and non-knowledge related issues. The implications for the management of knowledge in MHEI were explored.

The essay deals with remembering Yugoslav Youth Labour Actions in
post-Yugoslav news outlets. Youth Actions were originally conceptualized
as unwaged labour that arises from a specific relationship between the individual, the collective and the state. They followed the Maussian logic of gift, shaping the meaning of voluntary labour as a reciprocation to the society (Matošević). However, as it is possible to observe in news outlets and corporative volunteering in Slovenia, this understanding has been (partly) replaced by the concept of voluntary labour characteristic of capitalist societies. The labour they promote is individualized, characterized by sentimental rhetoric, presented as a possible way of spending free time and learning new skills, which brings it closer to concepts of leisure (Rojek), “serious leisure” (Stebbins) and “unwaged affective labour” (Muehlebach). Post-Yugoslav media discourse, trying to make sense of Yugoslav Youth Actions, becomes a place where different concepts of voluntary labour meet, collide and question each other, indirectly pointing to differences between two social systems. Finally, contemporary attempts to re-evoke Youth Labour Actions, covered in the media, are analysed. They refer to the past experience, but also transform it, abandoning the Maussian logic of being indebted to the community, perceiving voluntary labour as both an individual’s need for leisure and a way to mitigate social anomalies. Contemporary Youth Labour Actions can thus be seen as a simultaneous sign of adaptation to the new social order, but also an attempt of active engagement with the new social environment.

Through a discussion of the articles in this collection, the introduction explores the ways in which the inhabitations of liberalisation require and necessitate intensive self-fashioning from citizens. We call this protracted work on the self, which unsettles enduring pathways of social reproduction and avenues of social mobility, pedagogies of aspiration. Moving beyond debates about efficient markets versus a redistributive state as the ideal provider of education, we suggest that ethnographic inquiries that foreground the everyday experiences and stakes of fashioning aspirational selves in educational contexts help us understand the lived realities of democratic possibility in liberalising India today.

This paper draws on Berlant's (2011) concept of "cruel optimism" as it manifests itself in the lives of disabled people with learning disabilities living in England in a time of Big Society. We argue that Big Society offers a cluster of promises to disabled people with learning disabilities: citizenship, empowerment, community, social action and a route out of (or protection from) poverty. However, we suggest that these promises have been repeatedly offered and repeatedly denied and remain tantalizingly out of reach. While drawing attention to the injustices disabled people with learning disabilities face in Big Society, we also attend to the ways in which they are working the spaces of neoliberalism in order to resist "their designation as disposable bodies" (Tyler 2013: 224).

Renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s work on “global care chains” tracks the phenomenon in which women from the Global South migrate thousands of miles for years at a time to serve as nannies and domestic workers in wealthier countries.¹ When Vicky Diaz² moved from her home in the Philippines to Los Angeles to care for Tommy, the two-year-old son of an affluent white family in Beverly Hills, she joined this migration pattern, one of the largest in human history.³ Some scholars in the social sciences refer to this as a second colonization, one that mines affective resources from the Global South...

As the ‘voice with a smile’, the telephone operator was the human interface for a complex telecommunications infrastructure, recalling voices, conversing with customers, and carrying out requests. Such service had to combine cognitive and affective labor in a way that felt natural. Drawing on workers memoirs, training manuals, and managerial rhetoric between 1890 and 1940—an era of taylorist rationalization—the article tracks how the operator highlighted the limits of such rationalization. Rather than the mold of management, the operator required a more supple regime of self-management. This labor form initiated a shift from a prescriptive, mechanical worker to a more holistic, self-directed model. Anticipating by several decades Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ and Rose’s ‘enterprise of the self’, these theories nevertheless provide insight into this more flexible, more economic form of power. The operator thus provides a precursor for the contemporary subject who must also deftly combine cognitive and affective labor into an always-on, always-improving performance. In setting goals, auditing activity and integrating feedback, self-management proves more effective than any managerial intervention.

Reseña de  ¿Cada una en su lugar? Trabajo, género y clase en el servicio doméstico. Débora Gorbán y AniaTizziani. Editorial Biblos, Buenos Aires,p.213, 2018 (ISNN: 978-987-691-674-5) Lorena POBLETE * En este libro, Débora Gorbán y AniaTizziani se proponen estudiar "el servicio doméstico como un lugar paradigmático" que permite analizar la manera en la que se articulan diversas formas de jerarquización social. Particularmente, el libro se concentra en las jerarquías que se construyen en torno a la clase social, al género y a la raza/etnia. Lo específico de esta relación laboral es que, situándose en la intersección entre "lo público"-es decir, el trabajo, el dinero, la ley-y "lo privado"-la intimidad del mundo doméstico-, vincula a mujeres provenientes de clases sociales distintas. Sin embargo, tal como lo plantean las autoras, "el servicio doméstico no solo expresa dinámicas de desigualdad social, sino que contribuye a su actualización y reproducción en las prácticas cotidianas" (p.85). El libro contiene nueve capítulos. El primero presenta la manera en la que se construyó históricamente el servicio doméstico, y particularmente, las características que adquiere este sector en la actualidad. El segundo capítulo analiza distintas trayectorias laborales de trabajadoras domésticas.

Einen Körper zu haben, der als schön gilt und der gesellschaftlichen Normen und Erwartungen entspricht, ist Arbeit. Man kann auch von Körperarbeit sprechen. Schönheit ist hier eine Variable des Erfolgs – im Privat- wie auch im Arbeitsleben. Frauen stehen besonders unter Druck, ihren Körper der vorherrschenden Kultur entsprechend her- und zuzurichten. Damit einher gehen nicht nur erhebliche Kosten, sondern auch Diskriminierung in vielen Lebensbereichen sowie durch Medien und Werbung, die sich sowohl gegen normschöne, vor allem aber gegen alle als „anders“ Markierten richten kann. Was also tun?

Northern India’s historic, all-girls ‘Public Schools’ (a British gloss meaning ‘elite’ and ‘private’) have served as showcases of the nation’s modernity and progress since Independence, mobilised as productive models of women’s empowerment. While these
schools and their students were once mediated by nationalist views of gendered, aspirational selves, globally oriented, neoliberal markets have created new landscapes of elite crisis and negotiated citizenship. By examining the roles of staged performance, competition, service and choice, this article will address how many upper- and middle-class female students are encountering and crafting complex, contradictory models of empowerment and altruism.

Abstract.-This study offers a critical analysis of crowdfunding campaigns, arguing that they exemplify instantiations of neoliberalism influenced by, and reflective of, cultural commitments within music communities and a shifting industrial context. Emerging within this cultural and industrial ecology that is informed and shaped through the dynamic flux of fan/artist relationships

In a recruitment centre in Dimapur, Nagaland, indigenous youth are trained for employment as service personnel in luxury hotels, restaurants and airlines. Most of them are unemployed, seeking new future prospects outside the region and the harsh existence of subsistence agriculture. English language skills, a general cosmopolitan outlook and their fair complexion have proven key assets in securing work within the new hospitality industry. In this article, we deal with the activities at the recruitment centre itself, looking at the skill sets – the ‘soft skills’ – and habitus that the instructors try to instill in the participants to make them employable. We apply the notion of ‘affective labour’. Such labour is all about care, or more precisely in this context, caring for customers. But care also has a wider resonance in the lives of the young migrants, that is, to care for the family, community and ancestral lands back home.

As China continues to neoliberalize in the new millennium, the Internet and other social media also enable new subjects of affective labor to emerge. Since 2014, young men increasingly hawk their services as xuni lianren (virtual lovers) on popular Chinese websites. These men explicitly state that while they neither sell sex nor meet their clients in person, they behave otherwise as actual boyfriends would: over chatting apps, they
talk to clients for leisure, and provide relief from frustrations accumulated from family, school, and work. Using fieldwork data gathered from male virtual lovers, we argue that that their sale of immaterial affective labor substantiates [Virno, P. (2004). A grammar of the multitude: For an analysis of contemporary forms of life. New York: Semiotext(e)] idea of the social factory by demonstrating that social relations are indeed transforming (albeit incompletely) into relations of production.

TIME Magazine’s online 10-year commemoration of 9/11 "Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience" utilizes narratives of spectacular resilience, which this essay defines as a visual stylization with four features: an economy of suffering based on media attention, loss figured in terms of a catastrophic event, a depoliticized national model for confronting loss, and superlative heroic action. I contrast the form of spectacular resilience in the memorial with minor forms of endurance visualized in periodicals about immigrant and migrant labor who cleaned Ground Zero and surrounding areas after 9/11. I end with the implications of linking resilience and visuality together in commemorative politics.

W.A.G.E. is "a New York-based activist organization focused on regulating the payment of artist fees by nonprofit art institutions, and establishing a sustainable labor relation between artists and the institutions that subcontract their labor." We spoke about the evolution and current work of W.A.G.E., as well as specifically considering the work of performance artists and hired performers within the context of exhibitions and performances. W.A.G.E.'s website is a clearinghouse of resources on the economic and political conditions of professionalized art-making: http://W.A.G.E.forwork.com

Based on the philosophy of Yunus-founder of the Grameen Bank model and Nobel Prize laureatemicrofinance has been globally upheld as a neoliberal panacea for addressing poverty and income disparities. Despite these advances, microfinance-as a key policy tool for increasing well-being, social mobility, and capital markets in the underserved communities of the Global South-has not yet been evaluated for its effects in empowering women with disabilities. I draw from disability studies, feminist studies, and social work to examine the ethnographic phenomenon of disabled women who, despite dire poverty, take the unexpected strategic step of collectively refusing to accept microfinance loans. I argue that the individualizing, market-oriented logic of microfinance comports standards of compulsory able-bodiedness that are contradicted by disability as a reality that is experienced through relational kinship ties in rural India. This suggests that approaches to social work in microfinance and disability should attend to cultural aspects of power that manifest through beliefs about gender, ability, and kin-based relationality, beliefs which may sit uneasily with western cultural norms of autonomy, empowerment, and individual agency purported by neoliberal development programs. Finally, this article sheds light on the current development models and social work interventions in the public sphere, which tend to be ill-suited to redress the conditions of impairment that affect disabled women, and invites us to reimagine the domestic sphere as a domain of emergent dependencies and agentive possibilities.

This article examines the World Bank's disability and development projects in rural South India and illuminates neoliberalism's dangers for social work theory and practice in the Global South. Based on a multi-year ethnographic study involving participant observation and interviews with multiple stakeholders, it critically examines the individualized model of empowerment promoted by self-help groups in light of the structural and cultural realities of rural disability. It highlights the dangers of individualization and responsibilization of self-help group interventions and traces how disabled subjectivities are shaped in line with neoliberal governmentality. Foregrounding disability and global south perspectives on neoliberalism – often overlooked in social work scholarship – this article contributes an intersectional and transnational perspective to social work.

This article reflects on a performative praxis entailing cultural, symbolic, embodied, and political processes involved in negotiating difference and sameness from the perspective of doing disability research in India as a disabled “halfie.” Based on my own disability experience that disrupted binaries between insider and outsider, I argue that researchers’ disability identities themselves may not be sufficient for becoming an insider to the disability community, due to varying intersectional and cultural contexts. Exposing inadequacies of the liberal disability studies methodology in the social sciences, I draw from critical qualitative methods rooted in performative, postcolonial, and critical ethnography to address questions of positionality and reflexivity, facilitating similitude and knowledge production.

This article considers how Patrice Rushen's jazz-funk album, Shout It Out (1977), implicitly works as a punctum that indexes the irreconcilable relationship between black women's affectability and black women musicians' transgressive sonic praxis. Consequently, I consider how Rushen's use of sound technologies (i.e., multitracking, the clavinet) on Shout It Out attempts to reorient black women's affective and material labor to the end of sounding black women musician's J. Pop. Music Stud. 2017;29:e12243.

My aim in this paper is to introduce a theory of affective labor as byproductive, a concept I develop through analysis of the phenomenology of various affective labor practices in dialogue with feminist scholarship, both on gendered and racialized labor, and on affect and emotion. I motivate my theory in the context of literature on affective and emotional labor in philosophy and the social sciences, engaging the post-Marxist literature on affective and immaterial labor and emphasizing feminist critiques. I argue that affective labor is not only the work of producing affects for others to consume or the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains labor power and social life, but also the work of metabolizing waste affects and affective byproducts. Thus, byproductive labor is a neologism I develop to bring into view an affective economy and indeed a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor in its paid and unpaid variants. I make three central claims: (1) affective labor invariably creates byproducts in the embodied subjectivity of the worker, (2) the unique kind of affective expenditure I call “byproductive” (metabolizing affective surplus, containing affective waste, and producing depleted affective agency) is a defining feature of affective labor not circumscribed by the productive-reproductive distinction, and (3) the marginalized forms of subjectivity and depleted agency constituted through the intersections of this labor with hierarchies of gender, race, and migrant status or global class are themselves byproducts of affective labor. Thus, theorizing affective labor as byproductive captures the uniqueness of affective labor and the forms of exploitation unique to it, but also explains the interaction of affective labor with forms of power that operate through subjection and marginalization.

This paper draws attention to the somewhat neglected domains of affects, emotions, and subjectivity in the study of the commons. The paper argues that a focus on affective and communicative relations among humans and between humans and more-than-humans can enrich our understanding of the practices of commoning and the processes of becoming a commoner. Using the case of community forestry initiatives in Odisha, India, it illustrates how rural people become commoners through the embodied practices of caring for the forests as a shared common. The paper uses this empirical example and conceptual resources from affect theory and relational ontology to think about the commons as affective socio-nature entanglements and as a nurturing ground for subjectivity. It discusses the implications of attention on the commons and the practices of commoning for enabling the emergence of other-than-capitalist subjectivities.