The Future of Work

The primary aim of this course is to elucidate the colonial logic that underlies our imaginings of the future of work. Most often, the invocation of the ‘future of work’ refers to the contemporary practices and discourses that manifest and speculate upon how technology will impact the arrangement, distribution and function of work in the future. Taken as such, the future of work is most often analysed and imagined as either utopia or dystopia. This follows from either a faith in the potential of technology to liberate human society, and hence the world of work, from histories of domination and subjugation (i.e., techno utopianism), or from the apprehension that technology will intensify the same (i.e., techno pessimism). This course, however, seeks to unpack such naïve technological determinism and argues instead for an understanding of technology as an assemblage of tools and practices whose function and impact is contingent upon the context within which it operates. In particular, it identifies coloniality as the context of technology’s operation. In this course, we posit technology as the means of reproduction and, indeed, intensification of the colonial logic underlying the future of work. We learn that concerns about the discriminatory and degrading effects of technology in the future of work are, in effect, concerns about coloniality. And that, therefore, any possibility of a liberatory and just future of work lies not in (a faith in) better technologies, or doing technology better, but rather, becomes possible only through a fundamental undoing of colonial logic.   Credit Level: 10 Year taken: Year 3 Undergraduate SCQF credits: 20