Language Put to Work: Labour and Collective Organization in the Media and Communication Industries

ABOUT TRIPLE C – The Triple C Speakers Series is a monthly colloquium hosted by the Department of Communication and Culture presenting new research and special interest topics in the Social Sciences and Humanities to the University of Calgary community. The events are free and followed by a reception. Language Put to Work: Labour and Collective Organization in the Media and Communication Industries. Dr. Enda Brophy will engage with labour conditions, worker resistance and collective organization in the media and communication industries. Working in these sectors and joining the “creative class,” runs a dominant narrative, offers a possibility of passionate work, autonomy, and workplaces with minimal hierarchy. Yet, the reality of labour in the contemporary creative industries is often markedly different, characterized by increasing competitiveness, chronic overwork, endemic unpaid labour, and rampant unstable employment. The presentation will start with a discussion of the emergent collective responses to labour precarity by contract workers, interns, and other flexworkers. It will then move on to an overview of the remarkable rise of the transnational workforce toiling in call centres—one of the fastest growing and paradigmatic workspaces of our time. As a result of their steady meshing into the circuits of the global economy, the growth of call centres over the last quarter century has produced notable shifts in the composition of labour forces across many regions:Language Put to Work investigates emergent forms of labour resistance, conflict and collective organization along the digital assembly lines on three continents.

Location:

Social Sciences Building Room 202

Speaker:

Dr. Enda Brophy is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He is currently completing a manuscript on labour resistance in global call centres (Language Put to Work: Labour and Communicative Capitalism) and collaborating on a SSHRC-supported research project, Cultural Workers Organize (2011-2014). His translation of Gigi Roggero’s The Production of Living Knowledge: Crisis of the University and Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America was published by Temple University Press.

More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/language-put-work-labour-and-collective-organization-media-and-communication-industries