Introduction

From the spread of new forms of witch-hunting to the worldwide escalation of the number of women sexually abused, even murdered on a daily basis, evidence is mounting that a war is being waged against women. What are its motivations? What is the logic behind this phenomenon? Silvia Federici addresses these questions by relating the intensification of violence against women, the new forms of capital accumulation and women’s labor, and the different ways in which women are resisting victimization.

Silvia Federici is a feminist activist and a renowned political theorist. In 1972, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, which launched the campaign Wages for Housework internationally. Her previous books include Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004); Revolution at Point Zero (2012); Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (forthcoming 2018); and Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Common (forthcoming 2018). She is professor emerita at Hofstra University, previously worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years, and co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom for Africa. Her work has demonstrated the oversight in Marxian theory of one of the fundamental features of capitalist accumulation: namely, the subjugation of women and women’s productive and reproductive labour. Federici is known for her focus on the struggle against capitalist globalization and, more recently, on developing a feminist theory of the commons.

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