What Is Work?
There is no shortage of talk about “the future of work” and no end of efforts to “fix” work — to make it less “toxic”, more fulfilling, more balanced, more equitable, more conducive to social mobility, more “attractive” to employees. Not for the first time, automation threatens to render whole categories of work obsolescent, lending urgency to the project of “reimagining” work.
But— what is work?
Join us for a Time Kitchen conversation.
In Preparation
By way of a prompt, we offer
Lucia Berlin’s “My Jockey”, drawn from life and set in Oakland, California, in the 1970s. It is all of a page and will take you about three minutes.
Should you have the time and inclination, you’ll find a second story from the same era, “A Manual for Cleaning Women”, appended.
You do not need to have read the prompts to participate! Please come and just listen, or stream us in the background, or offer thoughts — meet us wherever you are that day.
In this edition, we’re eager to hear from you. In your view, what is work? You can send us an email, a text message, a voice message, or a video. We’ll choose a handful to present to the group — with your permission of course.
Your Hosts
Josh Berson is an anthropologist, novelist, and maker of procedural noise. He has held appointments at two Max Planck Institutes and the Berggruen Institute and is the author, among other things, of The Human Scaffold and The Meat Question.
Alex Booth is an unfoldment practitioner and strategic advisor. She has worked with Deloitte, Twilio, Morgan Stanley, Liberty Mutual, Novartis, and a variety of tech start-ups and organizational change/executive coaching consultancies.
Special Guest Painter and video artist J. Johari Palacio. J. Johari Palacio is an artist whose journey in Afro-Futurist/Surrealist abstraction weaves together the vibrant culture of his Belizean/Garifuna heritage with the urban landscape of South Los Angeles, resulting in a body of work that draws from new mythologies and the divine subconscious.
Raised in Los Angeles, Johari's artistry blossomed against a backdrop of the city’s graffiti subculture. His multidisciplinary artistic practice (collage, sound, multimedia) subverts convention and focuses on the minutiae of imagination. In 2013, he earned an MA in interdisciplinary art from Columbia College Chicago. He is based in Houston, Texas.
About Time Kitchen
Time Kitchen is a studio for regenerative thinking.
We use conversation, observation, and experiments with ephemeral artifacts to imagine new forms of life.
Fees
There are none. Come as you are.