Desensitisation and Working Lives 1: Activity
The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023
This session was streamed but not recorded
Date: 3/25/2023
Time: 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM
Room: Capitol Ballroom 4, Hyatt Regency, Fourth Floor
Type: Paper,
Theme:
Curated Track:
Sponsor Group(s):
No Sponsor Group Associated with this Session
Organizer(s):
Leila Dawney University of Exeter
David Bissell University of Melbourne
Chair(s):
Leila Dawney University of Exeter
David Bissell University of Melbourne
Description:
This session develops the recent interest in geography and beyond in anaesthetics, desensitisation and flat affects through an empirical focus on work.
Recent publications in political theory, human geography and cultural studies have paid attention to flat affects (Berlant 2015), disaffection (Yao 2021), and anaesthesia (Heyes 2020), generating new conceptual framings that undo the conflation of affect with “intensity”. Central to these debates has been a concern with the role of affect in late capitalism (Konings 2015, Berlant and Stewart 2019). Revisiting the conceptual concerns of our 2021 AAG session on anaesthetic geographies, this session invites contributions on the modulation of affect and sensation in relation to labour and economic life.
The utility of the concept of anaesthetics for a critical politics of affect in late capitalism has been discussed in relation to gambling (Schüll 2012), and to desensitizing the pressures of debt through refusal and distraction (Davey 2019, Dawney, Kirwan et al. 2020). Some forms of labour can be numbing themselves, in their tedium and repetitiveness, or lead to self-medication, for example against undervalued and relentless domestic and care labour. Forms of labour that are degrading, or physically and emotionally painful and traumatic (sex work, care work, killing, combat), require workers to adopt strategies of desensitisation and distance: practices of the self that seek to minimise their own exposure to the situation.
More recently, shifts in the technological mediation of life, the sudden changes to the sensorium brought about by responses to the pandemic, and the economic challenges of contemporary capitalism have shifted the gaze of many geographers towards the sensory buffers that are created between bodies and worlds both as a tactic of self-insulation and as a strategy of depersonalisation (Bissell 2022). The Covid pandemic has changed working lives for many, and impacted on both our relationship with work, our working practices and the logistics of how and with whom we work, including, of course, the online classroom (Klocker, Gillon et al. 2021). Public frustrations have led to increasing violence and aggression against front line workers in retail, transport, and increasingly stretched welfare, healthcare and local authority services, and generated a need to protect workers from abuse and learn techniques of de-escalation. New forms of refusal such as ‘quiet quitting’, the enforced slowness of long Covid and other chronic conditions, and online switch-offs can also inform these emerging forms of resistance through desensitisation to the intensities of late capitalist work.
Presentations (if applicable) and Session Agenda:
Leila Dawney, University of Exeter |
Detachments and alienations |
Jeff Rose |
The necropolitics of encampment abatements: Narrative political ecologies of unsheltered homelessness |
Jennie Middleton |
‘Care on the move’: labour, desensitisation, and the everyday mobilities of children with non-visible disabilities |
Elisabetta Crovara, School of Geography, University of Melbourne |
The micro-politics of flexibility: desensitisation, nebulous habits, and fluctuating affects of flexible work arrangements |
Vickie Zhang |
Transitioning life after industrial closure: Desensitising melancholic bodies with memory and habit |
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Desensitisation and Working Lives 1: Activity
Description
Type: Paper,
Date: 3/25/2023
Time: 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM
Room: Capitol Ballroom 4, Hyatt Regency, Fourth Floor
Contact the Primary Organizer
Leila Dawney University of Exeter
l.a.dawney@exeter.ac.uk