Sociocultural Wing Colloquium Series with Morganne Blais-McPherson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Public Policy, Simon Fraser University

Talk titled: Striking ‘from the belly’: Visceral subjectivity in picket line ecologies

 

Abstract: Immigrant workers in Prato, Italy have led dozens of strikes for their right to a forty-hour workweek. Hanging above encampments at factory gates, banners read, We want a more beautiful life. But when I asked a sustainability consultant whether these strikes were part of the sustainability movement, they replied that no, such protests were di pancia—they “come from the belly.” The projection of mind–body dualism onto environment–labour debates is not new: aspirations to degrowth are often dismissed by eco-modernists as inattentive to working-class “bread and butter” needs, reaffirming that a politics of more is required. This talk examines the transformation of ecological subjectivities at industrial picket lines, showing how picketers negotiate ecological care and responsibility through both verbal deliberation and embodied thought. I argue that these visceral experiences—of alienated wage labour and of tending to human and nonhuman interdependencies—generate ways of living beyond productivism.