Against the scholarly emphasis on precariousness, this article focuses on how gig work in 1970s Singapore was developed with the specific vision of enabling life for the working-class Singaporean family-man. From 1970 to 1993, the taxi company Comfort invested its operations with a powerful vision of the transformative potentials of taxi-driving labor. The gig work of taxis was made to change the work ethic of men, creating workers and fathers who could advance class mobility, nation-building, and the family, raising children who would become ideal workers of the future. Such hopes, however, still relied upon the insecurity of the gig to force the men into adherence. Entangled with patriarchy, nationalism, and familialism, this article examines the compromises exacted through the gig’s capacity to make live, and analyses how Comfort’s experiment has left a legacy in the ways that platformed gig work is governed today, which needs engagement and revision.
Keyword: discourse
Airing Grievances: Academic Hoaxing and the Performance of Boundary Work
Through an examination of the 2018 “grievance studies” hoax this essay considers the role hoaxing plays in the articulation of both internal and external modes of institutional critique that pertain to the production, verification, and dissemination of knowledge. By examining the grievances of three academics who wrote over twenty false/fraudulent articles—seven of which were published in (and later retracted from) peer-reviewed journals—this research attends to the different kinds of boundary work and repair that are performed and enacted by academics to shed light on the conflicting ways knowledge production and academic labour are currently contextualized and understood.
Response to “The Humanities and the University in Ruin”
Adam Sitze addresses the technological transformation of the academy, emphasized critically by Mowitt, which have put us beyond the troubles of discipline or disciplinarity to something more abstract and technical.