[csaa-forum] Adelaide Seminar Presentation Friday May 22 - Susan Luckman, Being At Work, At Home: ‘Self-Making’ and the Labour of Representation on the Etsy Online Shopfront - All Welcome

[Susan Luckman]

School of Communication, International Studies and Languages Seminar Presentation

Friday 22 May
3-4.15pm, C1.41, UniSA Magill campus


Professor Susan Luckman (CIL and HRI, UniSA)

Being At Work, At Home:
‘Self-Making’ and the Labour of Representation on the Etsy Online Shopfront

Working from home is regularly seen as more inclusive of family and other care-giving commitments, whether or not this is true in practice. As a flexible, frequently home-based workplace production economy, Etsy and design craft work models resonate with wider debates about engaging in self-actualising cultural work within the cultural economy. But as we know, such work often increasingly leaks into personal time, which results in longer hours of labour and Gregg’s ‘presence bleed’, whereby the worlds of paid work, domestic labour and leisure blur, normally at the expense of the latter. This is especially the case for women who retain the lion’s share of childrearing and domestic responsibilities. Thus digital technology is clearly enabling a different kind of workplace, one which allows a wider array of mobile work locations, and there is a lot of excellent work out there which examines the impacts of this.

In this paper I will consider the emotional and aesthetic labour required of design craft producers who are required to market themselves, their home and place of making, lifestyle and wider personal identity, as part of the value of the product they produce. Not ‘context collapse’ per se—whereby social networking means that divisions between separate social groups, to whom we may have presented different ‘sides’ of ourselves, are broken down and become porous—this ‘self-making’ as I’m calling it is a required strategy of presenting a particular integrated sense of self as both maker (the professional worker) and the person, as part of a wholistic performance of a seemingly integrated self, whose worlds of ‘work’ and ‘home’ are no longer spatially nor ontologically demarcated.


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[craftingself_logo]<http://craftingself.net/>


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