Phenomenal Work and Selves
309 Regent St.
London W1B 2HW
UK
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Professor Vicki Mayer, exploring the experience of new working selves.
Details
When Martin Heidegger wrote, “Only as phenomenology, ontology is possible,” he wanted to turn our attention to objects as things we make through human perception and experience. Turns out, many of those experiences happen at work. In fact many theories about experience are located in workplaces. Phenomenology’s method assumes that we are workers in the modern world. What this means is we have a self that is produced through work as an experience. We can call this our working selves.
This talk attempts to renarrate the experience of work as a storytelling process. To tell the contemporary story of precarity, alienation, and marginality uses experience to critique new working selves — the entrepreneur, the innovator, the influencer, and the creative. But stories remember and forget other stories. They base the disillusion with these working selves in a new politics with old caveats for class, race, and gender. Can we find inspiration in those forgotten stories? Can we reframe the assumptions belying our perceptions and experiences?
Biography
Vicki Mayer is Professor of Communication at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana (the United States). Author of three books and editor of three more and an encyclopedia, she has written broadly about work, jobs, and employment through the lens of cultural studies.
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