Tuesday 4 June 2013

Work in Utopia Workshop

Work in Utopia

915am-530pm, 4 July 2013, FASS meeting room 2, Lancaster University

Ideals aren’t enough: we need realistic assessments of possibilities and immediate tactics too. But ideals are necessary, because without them we can’t evaluate possibilities or form goals for our tactics. This one-day workshop at Lancaster University will consider ideals for work (what we do to make a living): what work would or will or should be in utopia. Should there be any work, or is it a curse from which we should free ourselves? How should work be distributed? How should appealing, autonomous, high-status work, or menial, grim, low-status work, be distributed? How should our working lives be organised - in hierarchies, democracies, by individual contract? What is the ideal of craftsmanship worth? What is the right relationship between work and education? between work and self-development? between work and play? between work at home and work outside it? Speakers will consider representations of utopian work, real-world prefiguring of utopian work, normative argument about the goods and evils of work, and the uses of utopianism for thinking about these issues.

Speakers: Professor Stephen Bevan (The Work Foundation), Dr Sam Clark (Lancaster), Dr Sarah Hitchen (Lancaster), Philipp Jeandree (Goldsmiths), Professor Ruth Kinna (Loughborough), Professor Andrew Sayer (Lancaster).

Free and open to all, thanks to funding from the Royal Institute of Philosophy

Further information and RSVP: sam.clark@lancaster.ac.uk


Tuesday 12 March 2013

Lessons learned

The main result of being linked to (as my post on GTA pay, below, was by the British Postgraduate Philosophy Association) is loads of spam comments.

I've therefore put a word-verification task into the comment form in the hope that I'll be able to stop moderating spam.