As Workers Leave the Factory, What’s Left Behind?

Saima Akhtar, an urban historian and co-creator of the series ‘In Front of the Factory’, will offer reflections on the advancement of new technologies and the future of work. The aim of the workshop is to foster a discussion among participants about work/labour as a primary site for capitalist accumulation and resistance, as well as the ways in which forms of image-making – particularly film – endorse or fail to support it.

This workshop is the third and final installment of the series ‘In Front of the Factory,’ which has focused on questions of work and the ways in which work/labour have been framed in past and contemporary forms of image-making. The workshop presents the research and conversations that accumulated through the series, including topics such as cinematic representations of women’s labour; the presence or absence of domestic and reproductive labour in visual media; the spatial and temporal dimensions of unemployment; the use of cinema for industrial knowledge production and nation-making; and the gendered and racial dimensions of labour in film and photography.

Programme

16:00 Introduction by Clio Nicastro

16:15-18:00 Workshop with Saima Akhtar

19:30 Keynote Silvia Federici: The Globalization of Women’s Work and New Forms of Violence Against Women

Introduction by Rosa Barotsi