Work/Ethics: Frameworks for Observing People at Work WNY 307

Instructor: Liza Johnson ‘92

This course is designed to help you think critically about your Williams In New York fieldwork. Experiential learning is not simply about experiencing, but about finding an analytic framework for thinking about that experience. Towards that end, we will take an interdisciplinary look at models for understanding work and labor, drawing from political theory, history, ethnography, creative nonfiction, fiction and filmmaking.

How do we think about work and labor in this moment in history? What is the
common sense of the workplace, and how do workers describe it casually “around the water cooler”? How do people talk about experience their work subjectively? What are structural ways that people have theorized work and labor, using social and economic models to characterize work under globalization? How do these structural and subjective approaches to work relate to one another? How do ideas about individual hard work, “luck and pluck,” determination, and talent coexist with ideas about alienation, the extraction of labor, and formations of empire? How are these ideas historically formed? Is it the case, as Lauren Berlant has observed, that languages of anxiety, contingency, and precarity may now take up the space where optimism, upward mobility, and meritocracy used to be?

This tutorial is directly linked to students’ field work or independent study project. In semi-weekly papers and meetings with a tutorial partner, students develop a framework for thinking about their observations in their field placements.

Tutorial with program Director Liza Johnson. Johnson is Associate Professor of Art at Williams College.