Simon Fraser University
Engaging the World

Course Outlines

Spring 2025 - SA 375 D100

Labour and the Arts of Living (A) (4)

Class Number: 2630

Delivery Method: In Person

Overview

  • Course Times + Location:

    Jan 6 – Apr 9, 2025: Wed, 9:30 a.m.–12:20 p.m.
    Burnaby

  • Instructor:

    Kathleen Millar
    kmillar@sfu.ca
    Office: AQ 5062
    Office Hours: By appointment

  • Prerequisites:

    SA 101 or SA 150 or SA 201W.

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Introduces sociocultural approaches to labour by examining the relationship between work and life in different parts of the world. Students will be given opportunities to reflect on their own working lives and aspirations for future employment. Topics include precarity, informality, unemployment, wageless life, work and citizenship, and post-work politics. Students who have taken SA 360 in Spring 2016 are not eligible to take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

Most of us, including as students, spend a significant portion of our waking hours at work. How do our working conditions and experiences shape the way we live our lives? And inversely, how do our life aspirations, commitments, values, and relationships impact the place of work in our everyday existence? These questions are especially important today, given the rise of precarious employment (and unemployment) throughout the world. Temp work can make it difficult to plan for the future. An unpaid internship can both tap into and complicate the mantra that “you should do what you love.” Prolonged unemployment can erode a worker’s identity or require that new bases for social belonging be found. As more informal kinds of work proliferate, there are also unintended or unforeseen consequences. New social movements arise around the identity of precarious labour. Other possibilities for fashioning work and life emerge. 

This course examines these recent changes in the lived experience and meaning of work from a global perspective. We will explore the lives of former steel workers in deindustrialized Chicago, unemployed youth in Japan, call center operators in India, volunteer workers in Italy, cooperative leaders who took over factories in Buenos Aires, and Uber drivers in North America. These cases will introduce students to important concepts in the sociocultural study of work including precarity, informality, immaterial and affective labour, Fordism and post-Fordism, the work society, wageless life, social reproduction, worker subjectivity, and post-work politics. Finally and perhaps most importantly, students will be given opportunities to reflect on course material in relation to their own working lives and to their aspirations for future employment after graduation.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Make connections between work and other dimensions of life in their own personal experience and as their experience relates to the experiences of others in different social positions across the globe;
• Explain why and how jobs, workplaces, and other forms of labour have changed in recent years;
• Reflect on what those changes mean for their current and future working lives and how they can draw on anthropological insights as they navigate these changes;
• Express their own original ideas about the anthropology of work in clearly written, analytical essays;
• Provide and receive constructive feedback on writing

Grading

  • Journal Entries 15%
  • Participation (in-class and discussion posts) 15%
  • Film Review 20%
  • Midterm 25%
  • Autoethnography 25%

NOTES:

Grading: Where a final exam is scheduled and the student does not write the exam or withdraws from the course before the deadline date, an N grade will be assigned. Unless otherwise specified on the course syllabus, all graded assignments for this course must be completed for a final grade other than N to be assigned. An N is considered as an F for the purposes of scholastic standing.

Grading System: The undergraduate course grading system is A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D, F, N (N standing indicates student did not complete course requirements). Intervals for the assignment of final letter grades based on course percentage grades are as follows:

A+ (95-100) | A (90-94) | A- (85-89) | B+ (80-84) | B (75-79) | B- (70-74) | C+ (65-69) | C (60-64) | C- (55-59) | D (50-54) | F (0-49) | N*
*N standing to indicate the student did not complete course requirements

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

All required reading will be made available through the SFU library and Canvas.

REQUIRED READING NOTES:

Your personalized Course Material list, including digital and physical textbooks, are available through the SFU Bookstore website by simply entering your Computing ID at: shop.sfu.ca/course-materials/my-personalized-course-materials.

Registrar Notes:

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: YOUR WORK, YOUR SUCCESS

SFU’s Academic Integrity website http://www.sfu.ca/students/academicintegrity.html is filled with information on what is meant by academic dishonesty, where you can find resources to help with your studies and the consequences of cheating. Check out the site for more information and videos that help explain the issues in plain English.

Each student is responsible for his or her conduct as it affects the university community. Academic dishonesty, in whatever form, is ultimately destructive of the values of the university. Furthermore, it is unfair and discouraging to the majority of students who pursue their studies honestly. Scholarly integrity is required of all members of the university. http://www.sfu.ca/policies/gazette/student/s10-01.html

RELIGIOUS ACCOMMODATION

Students with a faith background who may need accommodations during the term are encouraged to assess their needs as soon as possible and review the Multifaith religious accommodations website. The page outlines ways they begin working toward an accommodation and ensure solutions can be reached in a timely fashion.