Catherine Driscoll

Bio

Catherine Driscoll is Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She works in a range of fields, including cultural theory, online culture, modernity, rural studies, and youth culture. Her publications include Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (Columbia UP, 2002) and Modernist Cultural Studies (UP of Florida, 2009). Forthcoming publications include Teen Film: A Critical Introduction (Berg, 2010), Broadcast Yourself: Intimacy, Presence and Community Online (with Melissa Gregg), and a book on Australian country girlhood. Other current projects include an Australia Research Council project on country towns.

Abstract

Work/life: gatekeeping, ethics, online culture

In this presentation I want to think about the messiness of what is often referred to as work/life balance and understood by distinctions between leisure and labour in moves to manage what online culture means in the everyday lives of participants. It is not enough to acknowledge that work and life can't be distinguished in the same way when the tools of leisure - of games, of gifts, of social networking from maintaining family bonds to dating or socialising with friends, and of just passing the time - overlap in so many ways with work spaces, work tools, and the virtually compulsory elements of everyday life like banking or schooling. I'll draw for this discussion not only on critical theoretical approaches to labour, including speculative terms such as affective and immaterial labour, but also on policy documents designed to manage the incursion of life on work, on activist claims regarding the protection of life against the uncursions of work, and on ethnographic research across MMORPG gaming, MUVE participants, fan fiction journal communities and archives, and academic use of social networking sites.