This comes to us courtesy of Rachel Ezrol at Emory Law:
A Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative & Feminism and Legal Theory Workshop Project
A Workshop on Vulnerability at the Intersection of the Changing Firm and the Changing Family
When: October 16-17, 2015
Where: Emory University School of Law
Registration is FREE for Emory students, faculty, and staff.
http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07eb2ejk3i2e13daef&llr=7da4m4gab
From the Call for Papers:
Theories of dependency situate the limitations that attend the caregiving role in the construction of the relationship between work and family. The “worker,” defined without reference to family responsibilities, becomes capable of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and responsibility through stable, full-time employment. The privatized family, created by the union of spouses, is celebrated in terms of a self-sufficient ideal that addresses dependency within its own ranks, often through the gendered assumptions regarding responsibility for caretaking. The feminist project has long critiqued these arrangements as they enshrine the inequality that follows as natural and inevitable and cloak the burdens of caretaking from examination or critique. The interpenetrations of the family and the firm have thus been understood as both multiple and wide-ranging. Both this system and the feminist critique of it, however, are associated with the construction of wage labor that arose with industrialization. This workshop will apply the lens of vulnerability to consider the implications that arise from large scale changes in the structure of employment – changes that place this prior ideal of stable self-sufficiency beyond the reach of much of the population.
Issues For Discussion May Include:
This workshop will use vulnerability theory to explore the implications of the changing structure of employment and business organizations in the information age. In considering these changes, we ask in particular:
- How does the changing relationship between employment and the family, and particularly the disappearance of the breadwinner capable of earning a stable “family wage,” affect our understanding of the family and its association with care and dependency?
- How does the changing structure of employment and business organization affect possibilities for reform? What should be the role of a responsive state in directing these shifting flows of capital and care?
- How might a conception of the vulnerable subject help our analysis of the changing nature of the firm? What relationships does it bring into relief?
- What kind of legal subject is the business organization? Are there relevant distinctions among business and corporate forms in regard to understanding both vulnerability and the need for resilience?
- How are business organizations vulnerable? The family? Have these vulnerabilities shifted over time, and what forms of resilience are available for both institutions to respond to new economic realities?
- What, if any, should be the role of international and transnational organizations in a neoliberal era? What is their role in building both human and institutional resilience?
- Is corporate philanthropy an adequate response to the retraction of state regulation? What forms of resilience should be regulated and which should be left to the ‘free market’?
- How does the Supreme Court's willingness to assign rights to corporate persons (Citizen's United, Hobby Lobby), affect workers, customers and communities? The relationship between public and private arenas?
Rachel Ezrol
Program Coordinator | Emory University School of Law
1301 Clifton Road | Atlanta, GA 30322 | Room G500 Gambrell Hall
404-712-2420 (t) | 404-727-1973 (f)
Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative
Feminism and Legal Theory Project