Program
Labouring Culture
October 22, 2022 from 4:15pm EDT to 5:45pm EDT
Location: Room Y316
Chair: Kirk Niergarth
Valerie Uher, “Labour denied: resistance to (the work) of family in working class women’s literature”
How can working class people resist labour exploitation in our contemporary environment, where precarious work and worker atomization appears as the status quo? What can be learned from studying how workers struggled against similar conditions in previous eras? While not providing explicit answers, literature by authors of the post-war era such as works by Gabrielle Roy (1947), Myrtle Bergren (1964) and Austin Clarke (1968), provide glimpses of the ways working 25 class women struggled for dignity in their working lives in the context of the Canadian family, whether as wives, daughters or racialized domestic workers. As part of my ongoing dissertation research on depictions of labour unrest in Canadian literature and culture, this presentation will use a social reproduction approach to consider how working class women refuse, undermine and thwart the physical and psychic violence of domestic work, and what insights into our current working lives these depictions might offer.
Piyusha Chatterjee, “Buskers unite? Not quite: Labour of busking in the neoliberal city”
Drawing on a conflict between street-performers and the city over a busking spot in Old Montreal in 2019, this presentation will understand busking as labour in the neoliberal city. The contestation over space and the inability to organise themselves in this case brings up important tensions around precarious work, economic marginalisation and labour organising in post-Fordist economies. Against this backdrop, the second part of the presentation will examine the history of a metro buskers’ association in Montreal founded in 1982. The trajectory of the association’s evolution, appeal and disintegration highlights the nature and the role of labour intermediaries in this new economic order. Focus on the busker pushes the definition of work, creates space for informality in considerations of the economy, and draws attention to the fuzzy lines between spaces of production and social reproduction of labour. The research combines oral histories with informal archives of the association held by a busker.
Speakers / Panelists
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Labouring Culture
October 22, 2022 from 4:15pm EDT to 5:45pm EDT -
Labouring Culture
October 22, 2022 from 4:15pm EDT to 5:45pm EDT
Piyusha Chatterjee
Piyusha Chatterjee
Piyusha Chatterjee
Piyusha Chatterjee, is a PhD candidate in an interdisciplinary program at Concordia University, Tio'tia:ke/Montreal, and a settler/immigrant in Canada. My research revolves around labour in the cultural economy, 33 oral history and urban space. Titled “We were always here”: The labour of busking and its disappearing spaces in Montreal, my doctoral dissertation explores the place of the busker (street musicians and performers) in the political economy of the contemporary city and examines a streetside view of Montreal’s cultural economy from their vantage point. Previous to starting my PhD, I worked in India in the fields of oral history and journalism.
Valerie Uher
Valerie Uher
Valerie Uher
Valerie Uher, B.A. (Toronto), M.A. (X University), is a doctoral candidate at the University of Waterloo in the department of English Language and Literature. Valerie’s SSHRC supported research explores representations of precarious work, labour unrest and racialized migrant labour in Canadian literature. Her research interests include critical theory, political economy, and labour studies. Valerie is a co-editor of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory and her work has been published in ESC: English Studies in Canada and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.