In Conversation with Kathi Weeks

Join the Jackman Humanities Institute for a special panel discussion with Kathi Weeks⁠—JHI's 2022-2023 Distinguished Visiting Fellow. Kathi will be joined by Emily Nacol (Political Science) and Kiran Mirchandani (Education). Moderated by JHI Associate Director, Kimberley Yates.

Join scholars of labour Emily Nacol (UTM Political Science) and Kiran Mirchandani (OISE Leadership, Higher & Adult Education) for a wide-ranging discussion of the implications of Kathi Weeks’s Marxist-feminist approach to labour.  We'll look at intersectionality and the Global South, love and work/working for love, and knowledge production as a form of labour in the academic sphere, among many other facets of this urgent and contemporary topic. Bring your questions for the public Q&A!

Kathi Weeks, Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University, is a Marxist feminist political theorist, whose analysis of gender identities and hierarchies foregrounds the gender division of labor as a mechanism that reproduces inequality. Her research re-examines 1970s feminist analyses of waged and unwaged women’s work for insights into how both gendered and class systems of inequality are sustained and how they change over time. She is the author of Constituting Feminist Subjects (Cornell UP, 1998) and The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke UP, 2011), and a co-editor of The Jameson Reader (Blackwell, 2000).

In her 2011 book she re-examines 1970s Wages for Housework literature as an attempt to make domestic work visible and part of the valorization process, rather than separate from the experience of paid work outside the home. She takes aim at the work ethic that encourages workers to invest their time, energy and identity into work and defends an antiwork politics and postwork imagination.