Description
This event officially inaugurated the 2021 Pop-Up Institute: “Beyond the Future of Work: New Paradigms for Addressing Global Inequality.” After opening remarks on the urgent need to rethink work and livelihood, this roundtable reconvened speakers from our Fall 2020 Colloquium “Inequality, Labor, and Human Rights: The Future of Work in the Age of Pandemic” for an interdisciplinary conversation about the future of work and livelihoods, addressing themes from across each of the five research clusters: AI and Technology, Artistic Labor and the Humanities, Care Work, Essential Work, and Work across the Global South.
Key moments
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:50 Panel begins
- 12:00 – 17:45 Aaron Benanav discusses the rise of AI and Technology and the connections between disturbing later market trends, what the future of the economy is, the harms and possibilities of technology, and the role that the pandemic has played.
- 22:55 – 25:02 Adelle Blackett describes how the pandemic has exposed the invisibility of essential workers, discusses how work in racialized, and illuminates the existing normative structures that structure worker subordination.
- 25:27 – 26:55 Juan De Lara explains how the pandemic has highlighted the long-term, and ongoing, forms of precarity that essential workers experience, and the existing power structures which shape economic insecurity.
- 36:55 – 38:04 Prabha Kotiswaran explains that the declining labor force participation of women in the Global South is framed as a major problem signifying the “backwardness” of countries in this region, rather than a recognition of the unpaid labor that women do. She also calls for the expansion of the welfare state.
- 54:35 – 57:15 Juan De Lara prompts us to consider the role of the Global South and North in racial capitalism and considers the way the United States treats Mexican migrants as an important example.
- 1:27:35 – 1:30:08 Prabha Kotiswaran presents a more positive story about visions for a future where political parties in India are working to incorporate salaries for homemakers into a range of policy proposals. She also notes that these efforts resulted in disagreement in feminist spaces over the form this assistance should take.
