Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene [Paperback]

Labor and labor norms orient much of contemporary life, organizing our days and years and driving planetary environmental change. Yet,labor, as a foundational set of values and practices, has not been sufficiently interrogated in the context of the environmental humanities for its profound role in climate change and other crises. This collection of essays demonstrates the urgent need to rethink models and customs of labor and leisure in the Anthropocene. Recognizing the grave traumas and hazards plaguing planet Earth, contributors expose fundamental flaws in ideas of work and search for ways to redirect cultures toward more sustainable modes of life. These essays evaluate Anthropocene frames of interpretation, dramatize problems and potentials in regimes of labor, and explore leisure practices such as walking and storytelling as modes of recasting life, while a coda advocates reviving notions of work as craft.Labor and labor norms orient much of contemporary life, organizing our days and years. Yet, surprisingly, work norms have not been sufficiently interrogated for their profound roles in climate change and other crises gathered under the term “Anthropocene.” Essays in this book expose deep flaws in ideas of work and investigate leisure practices for (sometimes radically) alternative ways of life.Ryan Hediger is a professor of English at Kent State University in Ohio. He is the author of Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment, editor of Animals and War, coeditor of Animals and Agency, and is currently writing a monograph on labor norms and settler colonialism.

 

 Introduction: Denaturalizing the Slow Violence of Work
Ryan Hediger
Section One: Questioning “Anthropocene” Frames
Chapter 1: What’s Past is Prologue: The Dragon, the Phoenix, and the Golden Spike
David L. Rodland
Chapter 2: Anthropocene Performanl““