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Annie McClanahan: Essential Workers: Gigwork, Logistics, and the Sweated Labor of Circulation
Essential Workers: Gigwork, Logistics, and the Sweated Labor of Circulation
(p. 313 – 332)

Annie McClanahan

Essential Workers: Gigwork, Logistics, and the Sweated Labor of Circulation

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  • digital media
  • economics
  • capitalism
  • cultural critic
  • digital culture
  • ecology
  • art

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English

Annie McClanahan

is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). She is currently completing a book tentatively titled Tipwork, Gigwork, Microwork: Culture and the Wages of Service. She is co-editor of the online, open-access peer-reviewed journal Post45, co-directs UCI’s Black Studies Cluster Ph.D. recruitment project, and is on the advisory board for UCI-LIFTED, a prison education program.
Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

It has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity. Placed at the intersection of art, media and cultural studies as well as economic theory, the volume investigates the Cultural Logic of Environmentalization. As flows, circulations and liquidity resurface in all aspects of recent culture and contemporary art, this volume investigates the hypothesis of a genuine cultural logic of environmentalization through these three concepts.
It thus brings together two areas of research which have been largely separate. On the one hand, the volume takes up discussions about ecologies with and without nature and environmentalization as a contemporary form of power and capital. On the other hand, the volume takes its cue from Fredric Jameson’s notion that each stage of capitalism is accompanied by a genuine cultural logic. The volume introduces this current of materialist thinking into the ongoing discussions of ecologies and environmentalization. By analyzing contemporary art, architecture, theater, films, and literature, the 15 contributions by scholars and artists explore different fields where liquid forms, semantics of flow, or processes of circulation emerge as a contemporary cultural logic.

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