Course Description

Look at your iPhone. Or your shrimp har gow. Or your t-shirt. Now, think of the workers who made them for you. Who mines the metals for your phone? Who handles the shrimp for your yum cha? Who spins the cloth for your shirt? Behind our stuff is a hidden global network of people – people who often work dangerous jobs for little pay. This course helps students to see the people behind the things and invites us to ask: How can *we* shape the world of work?

We begin by examining two moments when work was transformed: the Industrial Revolution and the Asian economic “miracle.” We start at the factory and see how movies depicted the smoke, the machines, the assembly line as a “model” modern workspace; but, we also ask whether the modern factory actually started outside the “West” in China and the Caribbean.

We then explore how factories powered Asia’s “miraculous” economic growth after World War II by examining the lives of “factory girls,” “salarymen,” and labour activists across Asia, including Japan, India, and Hong Kong. Finally, we ask how globalization is creating a new world of work beyond the factory, and wonder: if robots come to take our jobs in a few years, what will “work” even mean?

Throughout the course, we will discuss interesting and fun media examples, including movies, advertisements, music, and photographs.

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Critically and creatively reflect on the world of work, understanding how and why we do the work we do. Connect work with issues such as migration, politics, war, and power.
2. Analyze the lives and concerns of workers from a diversity of class, gender, regional, and colonial positions.
3. Describe and analyze how work and workers connect across time and place, embedding Hong Kong workers and industrialization in historical and geographic context. Gain expertise on how types of work succeed and fail in
   helping workers.
4. Creatively and critically explain the worlds of work and workers that are hidden behind familiar objects and everyday events.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

Second semester (Wed)