Work That Causes Harm

Violent Labour and the Ecology of Suffering

Bibliographic Data

ID8895032
AuthorsJoshua Noiseux (corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume50
Issue2
Pages276-301
Publication date2019-11-12
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCanadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X
PublisherUniversity of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3138/cras.2018.023
OpenAlexW2992626610
LanguageEN
References cited36

In this article, “violent labour” is framed as work that causes harm: work that is necessarily situated in overlapping global contexts of contemporary technological capitalism, and harm that is always itself ecological, in the senses of distributed, relational, and complex. To explicate these senses, I sketch a political ecological case study of the harmful effects of global high-technology industries through the entirety of a causal spectrum that has mineral extraction in central Africa on one end, office jobs in California in the middle, and globally distributed e-waste processing on the other end. Conventional philosophical, legal, and common-sense perspectives that feature intention as the central salient component of violence are critiqued. A consequentialist and phenomenological alternative is proposed wherein the suffering of sentient beings within broadly conceived relational ecologies replaces the violent intent of discrete actors as the key metric for understanding the impacts of work that causes harm, or violent labour

Assemblage (archaeology · Capitalism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Harm · Political ecology · Political science · Politics · Salient · Situated · Sociology · Work (physics · Computer Science · Ecology · Employment and Welfare Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses

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