Work Requirements

Race, Disability, and the Print Culture of Social Welfare

Todd Carmody

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English

Duke University Press
05 August 2022

Social & cultural history; Disability: social aspects; Ethnic studies; Black & Asian studies; Social services & welfare, criminology

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.

By: Todd Carmody
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 544g
ISBN: 9781478018070
ISBN 10: 1478018070
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 05 August 2022
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for Work Requirements: Race, Disability, and the Print Culture of Social Welfare

""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)