This class will immerse students in the critical social theory related to labor and digital innovation to examine some of the latest promises related to the future of work. Technologists and pundits regularly hype the impact of technology on the future of work. Some predict that automation will make work more efficient and maximize productivity. Other predict that automation may eliminate work altogether, leaving people either unemployed or free to peruse their passions.
Students will evaluate and challenge these popular claims by engaging with the work of anthropologists, media scholars, historians, and feminist scholars writing about rationalization of work, the Protestant work ethic, and emerging forms of free and invisible labor. As we consider the relationship between technology, society, and the future of work, you will be able to examine how technology that promises to create efficiency in the workplace often creates its opposite, how contemporary automation encodes and sharpens workplace inequality rather than alleviates it and how digital innovation often devaluates and obscures people’s contribution rather than eliminates work.
Students will evaluate and challenge these popular claims by engaging with the work of anthropologists, media scholars, historians, and feminist scholars writing about rationalization of work, the Protestant work ethic, and emerging forms of free and invisible labor. As we consider the relationship between technology, society, and the future of work, you will be able to examine how technology that promises to create efficiency in the workplace often creates its opposite, how contemporary automation encodes and sharpens workplace inequality rather than alleviates it and how digital innovation often devaluates and obscures people’s contribution rather than eliminates work.
- Teacher: Yuliya Grinberg