McLuhan Centre Book Launch: Culture, Work, Resistance – Tuesday, May 30

13May17

McLuhan Centre for Culture & Technology with Cultural Workers Organize

Organizer of Book Launch: Culture/Work/Resistance

 LOCATION: McLuhan Centre for Culture & Technology, 39A Queens Park Crescent                       East off 121 St. Joseph St., Toronto, ON M5S 2C3

DATE & TIME: Tuesday, May 30, 6:00 – 7:30 PM 

REGISTER NOW at https://goo.gl/kHNxFZ

Mark Banks – Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality, (Rowman and Littlefield) – launched by Sarah Sharma

Creative Justice examines issues of inequality and injustice in the cultural industries and cultural workplace. It first aims to ‘do justice’ to the kinds of objects and texts produced by artists, musicians, designers and other kinds of symbol-makers – by appreciating them as meaningful goods with objective qualities. It also shows how cultural work itself has objective quality as a rewarding and socially-engaging practice, and not just a means to an economic end. But this book is also about injustice – made evident in the workings of arts education and cultural policy, and through the inequities and degradations of cultural work. In worlds where low pay and wage inequality are endemic, and where access to the best cultural academies, jobs and positions is becoming more strongly determined by social background, what chance do ordinary people have of obtaining their own                                                                   ‘creative justice’?..

Enda Brophy – Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce, (Palgrave MacMillan) – launched by Ursula Huws

This book examines the striking rise of call centres over the past quarter century through the lens of the resistance and collective organizing generated by workers along the digital assembly lines. Drawing on field research in Atlantic Canada, Ireland, Italy, and New Zealand, Enda Brophy investigates the contested making of the transnational call centre workforce and its integration into the circuits of global capitalism. Moving beyond depictions of call centre labour as either entirely liberated or utterly subordinated, Language Put to Work inquires into the forms of work refusal and insubordination provoked by the spread of these communicative workplaces …

Nicole Cohen – Writer’s Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age, (McGill-Queen’s University Press) – launched by Tanner Mirrlees

A timely study of freelance journalists’ working conditions and what is at stake for the future of journalism in precarious times.

---

As media industries undergo rapid change, the conditions of media work are shifting just as quickly, with an explosion in the number of journalists working as freelancers. Although commentary frequently lauds freelancers as ideal workers for the         information age – adaptable, multi-skilled, and entrepreneurial – Nicole Cohen argues that freelance media work is increasingly precarious, marked by declining incomes, loss of control over one’s work, intense workloads, long hours, and limited access to labour and social protections…

Filed under: Academic, Announcement, Book Launch, Books, Education, Events, Ideas, Scholars   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: academic, books, communication, culture, events, ideas, Toronto, university