A profusion of jobs has arisen in contemporary capitalism involving ‘connective labor’, or the work of emotional recognition. Yet the expansion of this interpersonal work occurs at the same time as its systematization, as pressures of efficiency, measurement and automation reshape the work, generating a ‘colliding intensification’. Existing scholarship offers three different ways of understanding the role of emotions in connective labor – as tool, commodity or vulnerability – depending on their view of systematization as useful, inseparable or dehumanizing. Based (...) on 106 in-depth interviews and 300+ hours of observations, I found that vestiges of all three models lurked in the experience of providing connective labor, yet none fully captured the profound meaning practitioners reported finding in their work. Systems varied on three dimensions, reflecting the relative worth of worker, recipient or the work, extracting value from the forged connections, while the meanings workers derived shaped their perspective on its systematization. (shrink)

This article establishes a dialogue between the philosopher Axel Honneth and the feminist scholars Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser. The aim is to emphasize the limits of Honneth’s philosophical reflections on the normative dimension of the family developed in Freedom’s Right. First, I present his ideas on how a normative expectation of social freedom permeates familial relations. According to him, after women entered the labour market, a normative notion of symmetrical participation in the family was produced. I aim to defend (...) here that, whether normative or not, this idea of family is not only limited but also false, since it does not consider the dilemmas of social reproduction whose consequences contradict social freedom. Next, I develop Federici’s and Fraser’s analyses of how families have always faced conflicts concerning the requirements of social reproduction and have produced diverse forms of subjugation that go against the very idea of the family as an unquestioned sphere of freedom. It is necessary to analyse how families produce new forms of subjugation to transform familial relations into truly possible ways of being socially free – and this requires making visible some figures who structure the family, such as nannies, friends and grandparents. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to propose that an insightful way of articulating the feminist concept of epistemic injustice can be provided by paying significant attention to recognition theory. The article intends to provide an account for diagnosing epistemic injustice as a social pathology and also attempts to paint a picture of some social cure of structural forms of epistemic injustice. While there are many virtues to the literature on epistemic injustice, epistemic exclusion and silencing, current discourse on diagnosing (...) as well as explicating and overcoming these social pathologies can be improved and enriched by bringing recognition theory into the conversation: under recognition theory, social normative standards are constructed out of the moral grammar of recognition attributions. I shall argue that the failure to properly recognize and afford somebody or a social group the epistemic respect they merit is an act of injustice in the sense of depriving individuals of a progressive social environment i... (shrink)