Communication studies seminar
VU City campus Flinders Street
Level 11, room 11.05

30 May 2012
2pm – 3.30pm

PANEL TITLE: LIFE, LABOUR, AND INFORMATION

PANEL OVERVIEW:
There is a key conjuncture of bodies and technology which underlies all three papers: our unprecedented ability to process and circulate vast amounts of data related to life and labour. At issue are shared questions of spatial/temporal measure, wherein the body is more intensely scrutinized by capital which seeks ever-more productive and profitable calibrations. This plays out on the scale of global enterprises where new logistical regimes seek increasing control of labour and life under protocological power; on new temporal scales where information labourers are permanently on call regardless of their location; and, in new mediated cultural practices of mobile connectivity in which we collectively generate ‘big social data.’ What possibilities for new forms of self-organization does this conjuncture afford? Is there liberatory potential in the autonomous movement of social data? In short, is there a crisis of measure that can engender radically new forms of labour and life?

1) DR. MELISSA GREGG (UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY)

PRESENCE BLEED: KNOWLEDGE WORK AND THE CRISIS OF MEASURE
This paper draws on empirical evidence and theories of affect to make sense of the online landscape for information labour. My aim is to unpack notions of workplace subjectivity and agency premised on ‘separate spheres’ and ‘clock time’ ­ questioning their usefulness in biomediated work worlds (Adkins 2009, Clough 2010). While the evidence used is based on a small study of professionals in Brisbane, Australia, the discussion bears relevance for workers in a range of industries, due to the so-called ‘ubiquity’ of mobile computing (Dourish and Bell 2011). If modernist notions of labour hinged on a set number of hours for work, often conducted at a set physical location, the fact that labour now escapes spatial and temporal measure poses obvious problems for defining work limits.

Melissa Gregg works in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney. She is author of Work’s Intimacy (Polity 2011), Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave 2006) and co-editor of The Affect Theory Reader (with Greg Seigworth, Duke UP 2010).

2) DR. NED ROSSITER (UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY)

LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARES: SOFTWARE, INFRASTRUCTURE, LABOUR
Logistical nightmares are everywhere. The unruly worker, the software glitch, wilful acts of laziness, sabotage and refusal, traffic gridlock, inventory blowouts, customs zealots, protocological conflicts and proliferating standards. Inefficiencies abound and logistics is forever frantic in its attempt to close the gap between labour and life in order to register productivity in real-time. The industry term here is ‘fault tolerance’. And this is when logistics becomes our collective nightmare. How does informatized labour go about self-organizing when situated in logistical regimes of protocological power? Where does subjectivity belong in the machinic production of value? What is the role of imagination and wild fantasies of other possible worlds when contingency equals closure? What becomes of life itself? Moving across Shanghai, Kolkata, Sydney and Athens, this paper sketches out a new theory of global logistics industries and their informational systems as the dominant architecture of control for contemporary labour and life.

Ned Rossiter is an Australian media theorist and author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006). He was based in Perth, Melbourne, Ulster, Beijing, Shanghai and Ningbo before taking up an appointment as Professor of Communication in 2011 in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney where he is also a member of the Institute for Culture and Society. Ned is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Creative Industries, Peking University. He is a researcher on Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders, http://transitlabour.asia

3) DR. MARK COTÉ (VICTORIA UNIVERSITY)

MOBILE BODIES AND MOTILE DATA IN THE AGE OF ‘BIG SOCIAL DATA’
My paper situates what Gregg calls information labour and Rossiter informatized labour in new mediated cultural practices engendered by ubiquitous connectivity and the rise of the smart phone. In the past I have examined this conflation of work and play via the concept of immaterial labour 2.0; here I will consider its extension and intensification via mobile access. In part, I will do so by previewing an innovative method under development here at VU which will utilise smart phones to gather data on mobility, location and information. In turn, I will suggest using ‘new materialist’ media theory to help us analyse such components of ‘big social data’ and the ramifications for labour and life, particularly in a new media ecology which affords a differential mobility of the body and ‘data motility.’

Mark Coté is a Canadian media theorist currently teaching at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia and previously held positions at McMaster University and Trent University in Canada. He has published widely on new media, social networks and the relationship between the human and technology in Theory & Event, ephemera, Journal of Communication Inquiry, and Journal of Cultural Economy among other scholarly journals. He is also co-editor of Utopian Pedagogy (University of Toronto Press, 2006).

A section of the protest group then stormed the office of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The final photo here captures Dean Duncan Ivison addressing the group after he was made to wait in turn following other speakers.

Thanks to Save USyd Jobs, USyd Greens and NTEU NSW for these images.

I love the photos especially because of the cubicles. Students fighting for their education in the very scene of administrative labour. But it made me think, how many will end up in a workplace just like this, whether or not their course options are cut? Does the consciousness-raising of this rally partly come down to realising what professional work now looks like? Especially given key staff in the faculty office – many of whom are themselves past and present students of the faculty – were live tweeting the events with empathy?

Protester/student/worker: the hybrid identity of cognitive capitalism.

When we did arrive, people were surprisingly welcoming, although when they asked if we would like to stay and if we were ‘queer’ I panicked a bit. I said – and I still find this funny today – that I wasn’t sure because I was ‘half’ queer. Of course people were quick to correct me and explain that ‘queer’ encompassed all sorts of non-straight sexualities and identities, and invited me to a queer women’s group called ‘Girlzone’ in the womyn’s room on Wednesdays. Although I found the name pretty awful, I went, and Girlzone would become an integral part of my time at University and ‘initiation’ into the queer scene.

It’s clear to me that my experiences in the queer scene have influenced my academic life and interests. Although I have an incredibly varied disciplinary background (from creative writing to psychology to cinema studies) I seemed to always write my undergraduate essays on the stock-standard weeks of ‘feminism’ or ‘queer theory’. Yet I often felt that what I was writing about remained wrapped up in a higher theoretical plane that didn’t address the very basic interactions and emotions I experienced within queer spaces. Often, I blamed academia for this – on Judith Butler’s inaccessible writing style, on the course coordinators who assigned our readings or on musty old academics who had no grasp on the ‘real world’. Yet, I would say that the older I get the more I realise how implicated I am in this too.

When given free reign over what to write my postgraduate diploma on, I still chose to do an in-depth analysis of Judith Butler. I guess I felt that to get at what ‘queer’ meant I had to engage with some of the most difficult writing on it, a process which often becomes overwhelming and disempowering, even as you feel like you are making some inroads into it. Of course there’s nothing wrong with Judith Butler per se – only that I was a culprit of what I sometimes felt she was guilty of: remaining locked on a theoretical plane. While my theoretical interests connected with my everyday ones, I still felt that I didn’t have a way to connect the two and felt invariably split in my life – manifest I think in my dual personas of academic and journalist – one who could talk freely and the other who could write about theory.

When I speak in the past tense like this you might be mistaken for thinking I mean a long time ago. But these are issues I still grapple with now and possibly partly why it took my thesis so long to get ‘off the ground’ so to speak. It’s still quite fresh and raw, but one of the things I want to do is engage much more closely with the events and emotions taking place within the queer scene and to question – and bring in somehow – my own relationship to it. So while I am now writing on how the concept of ‘queer’ has been strictly defined, policed and fought over within queer ethical scholarship, I am undertaking an ethnographic approach in my work to get to the bottom of how the same tensions have manifest within urban-based, radical activist communities in Sydney, Melbourne and Berlin specifically.

For example, when “Feminist Futures” happened in Melbourne last year I was quite upset about some of the fights and rhetoric that flew around queer forums about who should or shouldn’t be presenting. Sheila Jeffreys was part of a panel due to present on the topic of sex work, but was subject to a targeted campaign by many members of the queer community to remove her from the panel. She was deemed to represent the ‘past’ rather than the ‘future’ of feminism because of her views on the subject. And so I found myself ‘defending’ Sheila Jeffreys’ right to speak even though I feel politically quite at odds with her. Anyone who has been part of the queer community knows that to defend Sheila Jeffreys is social suicide. When I was invited to a facebook event encouraging me to protest against her inclusion in the “Feminist Futures” program, I felt it was finally time to speak up. But when I held out against the belief that anyone should be able to specify what a ‘future’ feminist looks like, I almost physically felt the blows directed at me in response. It was an extremely unpopular thing to say, and I still find myself avoiding eye contact with those who took me apart online.

So part of what I want to do in my thesis is tackle some of the things that have recently made me feel uncomfortable or unhappy within the queer community. Utilising an ethnographic approach helps me, I think, to ‘bridge’ the gaps I’ve felt between my academic and personal or ‘journalistic’ lives and to raise some of the important insights I have. But because I feel that the community (myself included) is often pressured to ‘band together’ and can be defensive in the face of criticism, this makes my task – and the political stakes – difficult. In many ways, I feel the anxiety of walking into the ‘queer lounge’ all over again. Somehow, although I have been variously embraced within and accepted into queer communities (at one point being a rep on the queer committee at Uni, being a journalist for ‘queer press’ and so on), I still have never felt completely comfortable in queer scenes and spaces, with the impression that I often say the ‘wrong’ thing or am resistant to trends within the community.

Fast-forward to this year and I’m writing a chapter about how arguments about ‘heteronormativity’ have become unhelpful within queer ethical scholarship and the community itself. Against the tide of many of my own friends critiquing the ‘drive to normalisation’ within queer communities, I have argued that the singling out people’s ‘normative’ behaviour for critique has had very damaging consequences. There seem to be very real pressures within the community – with no better way to put it – to be an ‘exemplary’ queer citizen, where ‘queer’ is very specifically and strategically defined against ‘inferior’ subjectivities like gay and lesbian, feminist and so on. Part of my task, then, is learning to draw on my own, and others’, lived experiences of these pressures in my work, something which drives my search for a methodology that can faithfully – and non-judgmentally – represent these pressures and their affective and emotive dimensions.

And yet, once again, I feel the fear of being unpopular in my stance – something that makes it very anxiety-provoking to write this paper. The idea that I could be saying the ‘wrong’ thing is something I’m trying to critique in my own work, but also something that still haunts my own involvement in these scenes and research work. I hope that by sharing some of these thoughts and feelings with you today I can go some way towards addressing my own difficulties in carrying out this research, and for others to share some of their own thoughts about how best to approach researching often politically and emotionally fraught spaces.

This is a slightly modified transcript of Kate O’Halloran’s presentation as part of the postgraduate panel, ‘Researching Queer Scenes, Spaces and Practices’, at last week’s workshop. Kate is a PhD student in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.

I am still a bit overwhelmed by the quality of presentations and the quantity of people in attendance at both days. I wish I could have seen everything. It also seems significant that we could fill a lecture hall beyond capacity to debate Why Gender Matters in the middle of summer in 2012. This was a very happy Sydney moment.

Feel free to share comments and feedback on the event here. I will be posting a couple of the presentations in separate entries to follow. Thanks to everyone who helped make such a special day. As I said in my welcome – we need to enjoy and celebrate these spaces and discussions when they exist! Never take them for granted.

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia annual conference 2012

Hosted by the Department of Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

Dec 4th-6th (pre-fix pre-conference Dec 3rd)

Organising committee: Fiona Allon, Prudence Black, Catherine Driscoll, Elspeth Probyn, Kane Race & Guy Redden.

Call for Papers

Cultural studies has a long history of investigating material practices – indeed it was a founding tenet of British cultural studies – but recently a new turn or return to materialism seems to be emerging in the field. What this materiality now means is still open, but we suggest that it flags a renewed interest in questions of how to study cultural objects, institutions and practices (methods), what constitutes matter and materiality (empiricism), and how things (humans and non-humans) are being reworked at a time of global economic, environmental and cultural flux.

Our keynotes have all directed critical attention to these questions – to the more-than-human, to new philosophies of matter, to the gendered material and economic circuits of media, and to ‘the heavy materiality of language’. We have invited them to help us in reinvigorating what cultural studies can do today. They include: Ross Chambers (Michigan), Katherine Gibson (UWS), Lesley Head (UoW), Bev Skeggs (Goldsmiths, London), and Sarah Whatmore (Oxford).

We encourage proposed panels and individual papers that engage with the wide spectrum of issues flagged by our title, including submissions that focus on:
· the crossing of science studies and cultural studies;
· questions of method;
· the relation between culture and economy;
· cultural histories of objects and forms;
· new ideas about empiricism;
· placing sexuality, gender and race within the more-than-human;
· the materiality of texts and genres;
· the future and the past of material cultural studies;
· environmental humanities and changing ecologies;
· cultural studies within the anthropocene;
· cultural relations with/in primary and natural resources;
· the new materiality of globalism

Papers and panels not focusing on the theme are also welcome.

Please send submissions to csaa.2012@gmail.com by August 24th and include your name and affiliation. Abstracts for papers should be 250-300 words. Panel submissions must include three individual abstracts, a panel title and 100-150 word rationale for the panel as a whole.

We will advise all proposers of accepted papers within 4 weeks of this deadline. Please note that accepted presenters will need to register before their paper will be scheduled in the program.

There will also be a separate event, “Pre-Fix”, geared to the needs of postgraduates and early career researchers, on December 3rd. Details of this and the main conference will be on a dedicated conference website soon.

CSAA website: http://www.csaa.asn.au/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CSAA2012
Twitter: csaa2012

Everyone is welcome, and this week Elspeth Probyn will join us for the discussion along with some other department colleagues.

If you would like the readings emailed to you let me know – although most are already available online through academia.edu or other sources (tip: add “pdf” to a Google search…)

Don’t forget to register for our workshop and Sydney Ideas events on Friday, February 24… we need to be sure the rooms are the right size

Gordon Waitt and Kevin Markwell, “Touring the Sexualized City” in Gay Tourism: Culture and Context, Haworth Press, 2006: 159-202

Kane Race, “Party animals: the significance of drug practices in the materialisation of urban gay identity” Forthcoming in S. Fraser and D. Moore (eds.) The Drug Effect: Health, Crime and Society. Cambridge University Press

Will Straw, “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Scenes and Communities in Popular Music,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (October, 1991) 361-375.

Elspeth Probyn, “Glass Selves: Emotions, Subjectivity, and the Research Process” in S. Gallagher (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Self. Oxford UP. 2011.

Optional:

Guy Davidson,”‘Contagious Relations’: Simulation, Paranoia, and the Postmodern Condition in William Friedkin’s Cruising and Felice Picano’s The Lure.”  GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.1 (2005): 23-64.

Judith Halberstam, “What’s that smell? Queer temporalities and subcultural lives” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6,3 (2003): 313–333

Elspeth Probyn, “Only connect? Communicating across the coreperipheries of geography and discipline”. Address to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2011.

Friday 24 February, University of Sydney

Location: Main Quadrangle, behind the Jacaranda tree: S224, S225 and S204

*To register for Researching Intimacy, Sexuality & Space on the 24th please email: sexualityspace@gmail.com. Please let us know of any access requirements in this email.*

PROGRAM

9.15am S224 Welcome and introductions

9.30am S224 Keynote: Annamarie Jagose, ‘Behaviorism’s Queer Trace: Sexuality and Orgasmic Reconditioning’

10.45 Break

11.00 S224 Plenary: Queer Style: Film, Poetry, Soap Opera

Speakers:
Dr Lee Wallace
Dr Kate Lilley
Dr Melissa Hardie

12.30 Lunch break (BYO)

1.30 – 3.00. Parallel Sessions

1. Transnational Queer S224

Queer thinking and thinking queer in Latin America
F. Serrano-Amaya, M.A. Viteri, & S. Vidal-Ortiz

The diary of an activist abroad: queer transnational flows and activist kinships
Daniel Marshall

Sex, tourism and desire: the emotional labour of gay hospitality
K. Markwell & Gordon Waitt

2. Liminal texts/spaces/events S225

James Franco’s ‘thing’
Adrian Jones

We will eat you, after we eat your children: queer futurity and narrative
Anna Westbrook

Queer Olfactories: Smelling Feeling, Disorientation, Peculiar Pillows
Kurt Bugden

3.00 Break

3.15: S224 Postgraduate panel: Queer methods

Kerryn Drysdale, Jess Kean, Kate O’Halloran + more TBC
Chair: Melissa Gregg (postgrads interested in joining can contact MG)

4.30 Break

5.00: S204 Sydney Ideas Panel: Why Gender Matters

Professor Sara Ahmed, Gilbert Caluya, Jennifer Germon, Annalise Pippard
Chair: Elspeth Probyn

Full details: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2012/why_gender_matters.shtml

6.30 Close – Cash bar on campus

Queer Thinking – Saturday 25 February – Seymour Centre

Featuring Professor Sara Ahmed, ‘Willful Queers: A queer history of the will’ – 7pm

Queer Thinking consists of a number of events on the 25th from 12pm – 8pm
For the full program see: http://www.mardigras.org.au/queerthinking/index.cfm

Bookings are advised.

Also, on Friday 24th, Kane and I are organising an all day workshop, ‘Researching intimacy, sexuality and space’ at The University of Sydney. It will feature a series of speakers from Sydney and elsewhere, and finishes with a public forum with Sara and others debating “Why Gender Matters.”

Full details of the line-up will be available shortly. For now, I wanted to mention that in preparation for the Friday event we are running a weekly reading and discussion group that people here may wish to follow online or come along and join.

We’ve decided to group the discussions under three themes that relate to the Friday program and the drawcard speakers – Annamarie Jagose, Kate Lilley, Melissa Hardie, Lee Wallace, Kane Race, Elspeth Probyn and Sara. The readings will give a good sense of each speaker’s background and key ideas, and we will use the meetings to discuss how their work and the different lineages relate to each other – and to the field.

Here’s how it will look:

Week 1 – Sex (AMJ)
Week 2 – Style (KL, MH, LW)
Week 3 – Space (SA, KR, EP)

The themes are broad but from each we will get a chance to discuss 1) politics of queer/sex/identity 2) aesthetics and style – especially in cultural forms 3) theories of space, embodiment, belonging, scenes.

If you are interested in coming along to one or several of these we will meet on campus each week starting this Friday (3rd) at 3pm. Both Kane and I will be there and possibly other faculty depending on availability.

The following readings are the starting point for this week’s meeting:

Annamarie Jagose “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Feminism and Psychology 19.2 (2009): 157-74.
Annamarie Jagose “Couterfeit Pleasures: Fake Orgasm and Queer Agency,” Textual Practice 24.3 (2010): 517-39.
Sara Ahmed “Sexual Orientations” in Queer Phenomenology, Duke UP (2006).

Get in touch to find out more…

The first time we interviewed Jodi* she was enjoying working from home once every few weeks. These were days when Jodi was encouraged to think about the big picture, to be “less operational and more strategic”. A typical day at work for the telco involved wall-to-wall meetings: “you have half an hour break and then you run to another one, or you have one that goes all day”. So working from home was a chance to work on longer term projects without this sense of coercive presenteeism.

On her home days, Jodi claimed she would have her email open an extra hour at each end of the day, from 7.30 in the morning until 10.30 at night: “Just because I’m addicted to it and I have to see and respond to everything because often a lot of urgent things come up”. Even though she cherished working from home to get away from the office schedule, Jodi felt obliged to stay connected nonetheless. Putting an “out of office” reply on her email account sent the wrong message, she felt:

if you put an ‘Out of office’ on saying ‘I’m working from home today and not available on email’, then they’d be like ‘Well, how are you working?’ People don’t understand that you could just be working on a project when you need to just spread out and think.

Another reason Jodi monitored email around the clock was because on any given day it was the main source of directives from superiors asking for tight turnarounds.

Like this morning… I planned all this stuff I needed to get done today and then something came up this morning that needed to be done by close of business at 8, and it was going to take up quite a bit of time, so lucky I saw that email and responded to it and was able to manage it and get it done before close of business today.

Jodi’s use of email, which she calls an “addiction”, is actually a matter of having learned to prepare for perceived emergencies, and adapting to the communication preferences of more powerful colleagues in the organisation. With her managers so often in meetings, face-to-face contact was rare. Email was the one constant in a chaotic schedule.

Following our first interview Jodi’s role changed to include being placed on an on-call roster in addition to her regular duties. For 48 hours every fortnight, she had to be available for conference calls to deal with critical incidents affecting the company. Service faults and coverage issues were among the key problems. Our meeting transpired in the middle of this period:

I was on-call all day Sunday, Monday and today… I was on a teleconference last night until 7.30, and I was on one again at 8 a.m. on the train this morning, and I was going to go to the gym in my lunch hour and I got called to another business bridge, and these are just urgent things. We have 20 minutes notice that you have to hop on, and they’re critical incidents that are happening to our customers and we have to work out how to manage them.

Jodi was conscious of how this new requirement of her role was affecting her usual routine:

it’s really hard for me to have that work/life balance when I – like I was doing my conference call last night while doing the groceries and driving to the grocery store, and this morning trying to do it on the train with all these people around me who are not supposed to know this confidential customer incident. And then, you know, again trying to have some balance in your lunch hour with some gym, and that doesn’t ever happen. I’ve had a membership for six months now and I’ve gone maybe for the first two months, and then I had it scheduled today to go and then a bridge was called in the middle of it. So I couldn’t go.

The urgency and unpredictability involved in Jodi’s new job obligations made it difficult for her to make the simplest of plans. Her efforts to place limits on work’s invasiveness sound like a series of traps or enclosures, as work follows her every turn once she leaves the office. Not knowing when work would be required while she was on call also affected her home life.

I had to keep my mobile on last night because they told me at the 8.30 bridge they were going to call one at 6 o’clock in the morning. So normally I would have my phone on silent and only turn it on when I woke up, but because I knew this one was coming, I had to have my phone on so that – I didn’t sleep very well, actually, and I had this by my bedside and I was just thinking about this stuff I had at work and I had to get up, about 3 o’clock in the morning, and write down the things that were running through my head that I had to do for work because my head was racing with all the stuff I have to do and I couldn’t relax until I’d written it down and my mind could forget about it.

To make matters worse, this on-call extension to Jodi’s job was unpaid. It was a mandatory add-on for an indefinite time, justified by the fact that the telco she worked for was going through “a five-year transformation period”.

We’re migrating our customers from one platform to another and things happen all the time, like ten a day, incidences of things going wrong. So one example this morning was 100 per cent of our systems were freezing and they couldn’t do any transactions at all, at all. So whenever a customer comes in: ‘Sorry, can’t help you; system frozen’. We had to develop a work-around and some comms for our staff to be able to tell customers what to say in the situation.

Jodi acknowledged that these improvements to the company were unavoidable:

The annoying thing is like it’s not something that you’d ever get recognition for or not something you’re going to make the business money; it’s just something that has to be done and we just have to do it as part of our job.

Even though she hated the extension to her role, Jodi modulated her frustration by saying: “my manager’s also on-call, so she understands what it’s like, so that’s something”. But her manager, Holly, was paid a higher salary for this level of responsibility. By contrast, Jodi had simply been told: “Someone has to do it and you’re the one that’s skilled to do it”. Like the technology she was using to stay in touch with work, Jodi’s job had become subject to function creep.

Jodi’s relatively junior position gave her few choices. While she would be entitled to time off in lieu, she seemed unlikely to claim back the hours. Too much individual complaint would look like trouble-making in this team-based workplace: “I haven’t heard of anyone asking for it. I think if I did ask, my manager would probably say ‘Well I’m doing it and I haven’t asked for it’, so I don’t think so”. Within a few months it became clear that the five-year “transformation period” for the company also involved offloading 800 workers across the country. Jodi’s manager was one of the redundancies, and most of the team was wiped out entirely.

Jodi’s story gives us clear evidence of the impact of the iPhone on the 8 hour day. Most obviously, online technology changes our sense of availability when it comes to job commitments. Work can invade spaces and times that were once protected from its reach. This is a process we might describe the presence bleed of contemporary working life, where firm boundaries between personal and professional identities slowly dissolve – and when work becomes so intimate that it carries in to the grocery shopping, even sleep.

Presence bleed explains the now familiar experience whereby the location and time of work become secondary considerations faced with a “to do” list that seems forever out of control. It captures the sense of responsibility workers feel in making themselves willing to work beyond paid hours, and the anxiety that can arise in jobs that involve a never-ending schedule of tasks that must be fulfilled – especially since there are not enough workers to carry the load. Checking email, monitoring phones and maintaining online awareness are the inevitable outcomes when technology design has meant that our office is now in our phone. And when the phone is always within reach – in your pocket, by the bed – how can you claim to be unavailable for work contact?

As the office has become virtual, work is no longer a noun, a physical space for labour to be contained. It is instead a verb: a practice that takes place wherever it seems most convenient. The challenge for labour politics today is that a growing number of us exist in workplaces no longer governed by “clock time” but by an unpredictable schedule of rolling “events” – and transformation periods that never end because managers stay employed by enacting them.

What Jodi’s story also tells us is technology plays a role in naturalising and disguising this additional, unmeasured and therefore unacknowledged labour. How many of us regularly check email on a mobile device, at random times of the day, because it is “convenient” to do so – or because email doesn’t “count” as work? And how many people today realistically have a job where answering email isn’t expected as part of the daily requirements? In my study, people would regularly get up at dawn, before the rest of the house woke up, to get on top of email before going to the office to do “real work”. Others, especially mums, would wait until late night, the dinner cooked and the kids asleep, to “catch up” on work. These are the dawn raids and midnight attacks in the ongoing war on email. And like the war on drugs, it is a war that can’t be won. By its very design, network technology delivers more information than it is humanly possible to process – so why do we think that tomorrow morning will be any different?

In the guise of “convenience”, the iPhone has helped to ensure that there is no excuse for workers not to be on top of information, up to speed, and ready to answer the call. The irony is that managers regularly see these devices as key to better workforce productivity. Now, I grew up on a farm. My first workplace was my dad’s shearing shed. People in this audience will know that shearers fought for a workplace with the clearest 8 hour day you can imagine: 4 x 2 hour shifts, with smoko and a lunch break in between. In the work worlds I live and study today, people are sleeping with their phones, and checking email over breakfast. Is this the kind of life that a relatively wealthy country gives rise to? What room does it leave for social participation beyond paid work? If we are moving to a knowledge economy, as ALP leaders regularly tell us, it is time we came up with a new language to put limits on these seemingly inescapable labours.

*Not her real name.