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Work Requirements

Race, Disability, and the Print Culture of Social Welfare

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Book

Pages: 328

Illustrations: 88 illustrations

Published: August 2022

Author: Todd Carmody

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.

Praise

“Work Requirements offers an affecting account of the intimacies connecting labor, race, and disability from Reconstruction to the Progressive Era. Todd Carmody links seemingly disparate texts into a powerful and cogent origin story of the modern American distinction between the deserving and the undeserving, revealing how discourses about the meaningfulness of work allowed for the disparagement of the disabled, the nonwhite, and the poor.” - Lloyd Pratt, author of The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature

“This extraordinary book offers bracingly new insights into the past, yoking the project of social welfare to the consolidation of a work society and powerfully revealing their shared entanglement in racialized fantasies about the ‘able’ body. More urgently still, Todd Carmody also illuminates the prehistory of our own contemporary moment, from the discourse of neoliberal workfare to the renewal of antiwork politics in an age of ‘unproductive’ labor.” - Annie McClanahan, author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture

"Work Requirements is a creative, persuasive, and well-crafted analysis of the representational labor undergirding our “work society”. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to contest this mode of social organization." - Karen M. Tani, International Journal of Social History

"Work Requirements is an accessible and focused text, assembling a diverse theoretical and historical archive. It contributes to disability literatures and histories, print culture studies, welfare histories, and intersectional studies in race and disability in the US." - Milo Obourn, American Literary History Online Review

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Price: $27.95

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Todd Carmody is a writer, researcher, and strategy consultant in New York and a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute.

Table Of Contents

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Introduction. Signs Taken for Work  1
1. The Pensioner’s Claim  33
2. The Beggar’s Case  74
3. The Work of the Image  119
4. Institutional Rhythms  172
Coda. Remaking Reciprocity  214
Acknowledgments  221
Notes  225
Bibliography  289
Index  315

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1807-0 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-1544-4 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-2268-8 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478022688