Building as Body: A Handbook for Investigating the Workplace Manual Labours introduce their Building as Body handbook, launched at Nottingham Contemporary on 10 November 2018. Building as Body: A Handbook for Investigating the Workplace, developed following our residency at Nottingham Contemporary where we worked with staff to explore the architecture of the workplace. Building as Body looks into the ways in which buildings and bodies are fluid ecosystems which affect each other, mapping how the circulatory, digestive and (social) reproductive systems operate in the cultural institution. What symptoms does this building suffer with? What ways can we diagnose and challenge the conditions that perpetuate them? A key issue that emerged through the investigations of the building as body is the areas of social reproduction for staff, such as spaces for resting, caring, grooming, pooing, eating, chatting, smoking, including the cafe, bench, toilet, kitchen, staff room, desk and storage room are needed to sustain the worker. Social reproductive labour is the process of maintaining bodies and spaces and might be carried out alone or with others. It is the foundation upon which all productive labour is possible. However, this work, and the spaces necessary to carry out social reproductive labour are often invisible, unpaid or overlooked. Social reproduction theory questions how and who maintains workers so that they can continue to work. While the focus is often on the domestic, private spheres of care needed to reproduce a healthy and efficient workforce, examinations within this study have focused on the workplace as equally crucial to the social reproduction, maintenance and care of the worker. And thus the workplace can be seen as an expanded site of feminist reproductive struggle. As the title suggests this is a resource for you to read and use when considering your own workplace, whether entering it as a freelance worker or a salaried employee. We hope you might find this alongside your staff handbook, or in your staffroom (if you have one). Maybe it is something you might take home to discuss with friends and colleagues, use at union workshops, share at your community centre or email around your colleagues to discuss on your lunch break. We hope this manual could be sent to your boss and the agency staff employed at your workplace to encourage collective conversations about work. Manual Labours is an ongoing practice-based research project exploring physical and emotional relationships to work, initiated by Jenny Richards and Sophie Hope. This project reconsiders current time-based structures of work (when does work start and end?) and reasserts the significance of the physical (manual) aspect of immaterial, affective and emotional labour. www.manuallabours.co.uk Hard copy = £10.00 including postage and packaging. Contact: manual.labours@gmail.com Or Download Manual #4 for free here. Manual Labours Manual #4: Building as Body By Manual Labours (Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards), 2018 Design Assistance and Layout by Saria Digregorio Typeset in League Mono and League Gothic by League of Moveable Type Printing by Dizzy Ink, Nottingham Published by Cultural Democracy Editions, London, November 2018 Distributed by Manual Labours, London, AND public and Nottingham Contemporary. ISBN: 978-0-9570282-5-8 All future income from sales of the Manual go back into the Manual Labours project and touring of the Wandering Womb.
SPECIAL ISSUE | Historical Materialism Historical Materialism, Volume 24, Issue 2 (2016) The 2011 Historical Materialism Conference in London saw the launch of a Marxist-Feminist set of panels. This issue is inspired by the success of those panels, and the remarkably sustained interest in reviving and moving beyond older debates and discussions. (more…)
BOOK | Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class Re-centring Oppression | Tithi Bhattacharya How do child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality affect our lives under capitalism? This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are (more…)
JOURNAL ARTICLE | The Art of Social Reproduction | Victoria Horne Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 15 no. 2 (August 2016): 179-202. This article considers how the museum produces knowledge about the past and present of feminist politics through its framing of marginal, activist artworks that have engaged the sphere of social reproduction or care labour. It is contended that neoliberalism’s assault on social reproduction in our current ‘age of austerity’ – which sees responsibility displaced from the state onto individuals – (more…)
BOOK | Feminism and Art History Now | Lara Perry & Victoria Horne To what extent have developments in global politics, artworld institutions, and local cultures reshaped the critical directions of feminist art historians? The significant new research gathered here engages with the rich inheritance of feminist historiography since around 1970, and considers how to maintain the forcefulness of its critique while addressing contemporary political struggles. Taking on subjects that reflect the museological, global and materialist trajectories of twenty-first-century art historical scholarship, the chapters address the themes of Invisibility, Temporality, Spatiality and Storytelling. (more…)
SPECIAL ISSUE | Viewpoint Magazine ISSUE 5 | Social Reproduction INTRODUCTION Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi | Making a Living Today, amidst a changed political and class landscape, strategy should take precedence over fidelity to the received canon. The activities of social reproduction remain the field of powerful class antagonisms. (more…)
