Announcing new website and 2012 working groups for the Humanities and Changing Conceptions of Work Research Initiative

On behalf of the UC Humanities Network, UCHRI is pleased to announce the launch of the Humanities and Work website: http://humanitiesandwork.org.

We are also very pleased to announce the selections for the first working groups on the Humanities and Changing Conceptions of Work:

Changing Work, Changing Workforce: Immigrants and their Impact on the Meanings of Work, coordinated by Steve McKay, sociology professor and director of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Labor Studies, will explore the relations between the changing economy, changing meanings of work, and the changing labor force by addressing a central animating question: how does WHO does the work affect the conceptions of work itself?

Santa Cruz Commons: Activist Research and the Public Humanities, coordinated by Nancy Chen, professor of anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, will consider how humanities scholars and research can support the efforts of citizens and community activists to create alternative economies based on innovative, collaborative and productive forms of work and to further movements for social and economic justice.

Working at Living: The Social Relations of Precarity, coordinated by Eileen Boris, professor of feminist studies and director of the Center of Research on Women and Social Justice at UC Santa Barbara, explores the social relations of precarious labor, both formal and informal, from an interdisciplinary, global, and intersectional approach that considers how sociocultural inequalities are and have been magnified and countered during times of financial crises, technological development, and increasing unemployment.

Together these three groups represent nearly thirty faculty and graduate students from eight of the ten UC campuses and more than a dozen different fields or disciplines. The groups will work throughout 2012, and regular reports on their work and activities will be posted on the UC Humanities Forum over the course of the year.

A second round of working groups will be selected in late spring for the 2012-13 academic year. The deadline for applications is March 15, 2012.

More information on the 2012 working groups and other upcoming opportunities to participate in the research initiative on the Humanities and Changing Conceptions of Work can be found at http://humanitiesandwork.org.