Work Requirements: Race, Disability, and the Print Culture of Social Welfare
Throughout the history of the United States, work-based social welfare practices have served to affirm the moral value of work. In the late nineteenth century this representational project came to be mediated by the printed word with the emergence of industrial print technologies, the expansion of l...
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Zusammenfassung: | Throughout the history of the United States, work-based social
welfare practices have served to affirm the moral value of work. In
the late nineteenth century this representational project came to
be mediated by the printed word with the emergence of industrial
print technologies, the expansion of literacy, and the rise of
professionalization. In Work Requirements Todd Carmody
asks how work, even the most debasing or unproductive labor, came
to be seen as inherently meaningful during this era. He explores
how the print culture of social welfare-produced by public
administrators, by economic planners, by social scientists, and in
literature and the arts-tasked people on the social and economic
margins, specifically racial minorities, incarcerated people, and
people with disabilities, with shoring up the fundamental dignity
of work as such. He also outlines how disability itself became a
tool of social discipline, defined by bureaucratized institutions
as the inability to work. By interrogating the representational
effort necessary to make work seem inherently meaningful, Carmody
ultimately reveals a forgotten history of competing efforts to
think social belonging beyond or even without work. |
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DOI: | 10.2307/j.ctv2vr9dc1 |