Suchergebnisse

This article explores the making of two branded Spotify playlists to critique the concept of 'affective labor.' Over the last few decades, scholars have argued that social media users and creative industries workers alike are engaged in a new type of labor, affective labor, which generates economic value for companies. The article challenges this framing. Drawing on Marxist concepts of productive and unproductive labor, in addition to feminist social reproduction theory, it details playlists made for Motorola phones and Itaú bank by paid contractors. The article situates the role of these playlists, as part of advertising campaigns, within the broader circuits of capital, showing how both paid and unpaid playlisting are unproductive labor, and therefore do not produce surplus value. The playlists do, however, assist in the overall reproduction of capitalism, particularly through the commodification of labor power for the paid lists. The article argues that characterizing musical production involving affect, especially online, as 'affective labor' hampers our ability to understand affect within the production and reproduction of capitalist social relations. It contends that a key political question of affect is not only the production of subjectivities, but the conversion of affectively dense, social values into commodified labor controlled by capital. Affective politics is when affects are literally put to work.

This introduction to the special issue "Societies under Stress" provides an intellectual context for the four articles that follow. The conferences at which the articles were presented brought together comparative welfare state researchers and scholars who work on crime and punishment to explore the links between social welfare and penal policy, particularly in social settings where neoliberal austerity or rising levels of criminal violence put pressure on these fields of social policy. Participants were drawn from Europe, the United States, and Latin America and represented a variety of social science disciplines and an eclectic mix of research methodologies.

Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh illustrate the theory and praxis of decoloniality through this text. By drawing upon examples of decolonial movements in South America, On Decoloniality challenges the reader to question assumptions of Western epistemological predicates from perspectives that challenge the epistemic limitations imposed by the hegemony of Western and modern/colonial epistemology. These questions contribute to the process of "delinking," or decolonial thinking, advanced by On Decoloniality. However, the text continues a legacy of white settler scholarship that has not gone far enough in addressing concerns raised by indigenous thinkers like Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Eve Tuck, whose epistemic, political and territorial sovereignty is at the center of the decolonial project.

This article argues that to explain American penal exceptionalism, we have to consider America's exceptional levels of punishment together with America's exceptional levels of violence and disorder, while understanding both of these as outcomes of America's distinctive political economy. After specifying the multiple respects in which American penality is a comparative outlier, the article develops a new theorization of modes of penal action that reveals the extent to which the US has come to rely on penal controls rather than other kinds of punishment. This over-reliance on penal controls is viewed as an adaptation to the weakness of non-penal social controls in American communities. These social control deficits are, in turn, attributed to America's ultra-liberal political economy, which is seen as having detrimental effects for the functioning of families and communities, tending to reduce the effectiveness of informal social controls and to generate high levels of neighborhood disorganization and violence. The same political economy limits the capacity of government to respond to these structurally generated problems using the social policy interventions characteristic of more fully developed welfare states. The result is a marked bias toward the use of penal controls.