After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time
About this audiobook
A vital and timely proposal for a feminist post-work politics
Would you let a robot clean your house?
When we think about work, we still tend to think about workplaces—if we think about reducing work, we think about reducing working hours and spending more time at home. But the home has never been free from work, and with the continued gendered division of labor, women still do the bulk of domestic activities.
As two-income families find themselves ever more time-poor, many look to outsource to cleaners, nannies, and care workers. More and more, it would seem, people are finding themselves without either the emotional or the financial resources to take care of themselves and each other. The home, rather than an escape from the work and its pressures, is in fact an extension of it.
After Work is a crucial corrective to this trend, extending its attention beyond paid jobs to the impact of domestic work upon familial relationships, social bonds, and our very conceptions of domestic space. What if we automated housework?
In this groundbreaking work, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek argue that there is a crisis that can and should be tackled. Only by rethinking the way we organize our living arrangements, redefining our domestic standards, and remaining open to the automation of work done in the home, they argue, can we imagine a world that is truly post-work.
About the author
Helen Hester, head of film and media at the University of West London, is the author of several books and series editor for Ashgate’s Sexualities in Society book series. Nick Srnicek is a lecturer at City University, author of Platform Capitalism, coauthor of Inventing the Future, and coeditor of The Speculative Turn.
Nick Srnicek is a lecturer at City University, author of Platform Capitalism, co-author of Inventing the Future, and co-editor of The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism.
Marisa Calin is an actress, narrator, and novelist born in England and educated in New York at the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts. An artist with a flair for everything literary, she has written a young adult novel, You & Me, which received a Kirkus Starred Review, and has narrated the audio books Ruby Red and Sapphire Blue by Kerstin Gier.
