Day Ten: Futures and Fictions in Secondhand Economies
Feminist economics is an approach to understanding social life and the economic which underscores the importance of care work, reproductive labor, types of essential activities that sustain human societies and lives that are primarily carried out by people gendered as women, racialized and migrants.
Reflect on what kinds of care work and invisibilized labor do you do in reselling and elsewhere? Think about your relationship to reselling nad time. What are some connections between reselling and time poverty for you?
Reflect on what kinds of care work and invisibilized labor do you do in reselling and elsewhere? Think about your relationship to reselling nad time. What are some connections between reselling and time poverty for you?
Conundrums
How can we build more communal secondhand economies?
Given our embeddedness in individualistic and competitive cultures in capitalist spaces, especially as resellers within digital platforms, how can we create communal practices? Who is this ‘we’ to start with? This conundrum speaks to addressing the (im)possibilities of communality in a diverse group.
How can we unravel the ethical threads in secondhand economies?
Thrifting and secondhand, as it currently stands, is an extension of consumerism rather than a curb to it. Changing this requires more transformative, imaginative and structural views of the global and colonial imbrications of secondhand economies for fashion, furniture, consumer products, etc. What is the role of workers of secondhand economies in reshaping this landscape?
How can we queer/resist the role of computing technologies in secondhand?
Increasingly relying on machine learning powered automation has deleterious effects for the environment, relies on invisibilized labor (of annotators in the global south mostly) and could entrench precarity in many occupations. Could these tehcnologies be used for more life-sustaining futures where well-being for earthlings is prioritized?
Given our embeddedness in individualistic and competitive cultures in capitalist spaces, especially as resellers within digital platforms, how can we create communal practices? Who is this ‘we’ to start with? This conundrum speaks to addressing the (im)possibilities of communality in a diverse group.
How can we unravel the ethical threads in secondhand economies?
Thrifting and secondhand, as it currently stands, is an extension of consumerism rather than a curb to it. Changing this requires more transformative, imaginative and structural views of the global and colonial imbrications of secondhand economies for fashion, furniture, consumer products, etc. What is the role of workers of secondhand economies in reshaping this landscape?
How can we queer/resist the role of computing technologies in secondhand?
Increasingly relying on machine learning powered automation has deleterious effects for the environment, relies on invisibilized labor (of annotators in the global south mostly) and could entrench precarity in many occupations. Could these tehcnologies be used for more life-sustaining futures where well-being for earthlings is prioritized?