thresholds 44: workspace

thresholds 44, devoted to workspaces, is looking for contributions that engage the idea of workspace at a variety of scales and across history, politics and geography.

A worker vacuums pine needles after a Christmas tree was removed from the Oval Office, December 30, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

When an employee at Google’s Mexico City office takes a post-lunch plunge into the on-site ball pit, is she working or playing?

And when an employee in one of Foxconn’s factory sites in China leaps from his eighth-floor dormitory, only to be cradled in recently installed “suicide” netting, is he fulfilling or transgressing the design of the workspace?

Long hidden in museum basements, conservation labs and storage rooms now feature prominently in museum designs. Facing complicated visa programs and unsavory jobs, employers skirt bureaucracy to sustain the agricultural industry in the US and illegal workers stay undocumented in order to be easily employable. When and why are certain workspaces – and workers – hidden or revealed? What is the “work” that is supposed to happen in the workspace and how have transformations of the tools, economies, demographics, and technologies within the workspace shaped the notion of work?

**Top**: A worker vacuums pine needles after a Christmas tree was removed from the Oval Office, December 30, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy). **Above**: Shaanxi Sanhe College, Baoji, China

thresholds 44: workspace seeks to mine how the meanings of and locations for work have been historically and culturally defined, how work transposes earlier notions of labor and craft production, and how the work of artists, writers, architects, designers, and urban planners – alongside managers, psychologists, political leaders, and employees themselves – have been integral in construing the physical and mental conditions of work, rest, and play.

For this issue the editors welcome contributions that engage the idea of workspace at a variety of scales and across historical moments and political geographies and that incorporate diverse theoretical approaches and unorthodox subject matter.

The eight-storey Rana Plaza factory building near Dhaka collapsed on April 24, 2013

Submission deadline: May 1, 2015
thresholds 44: workspace

thresholds 44: workspace

thresholds 44, devoted to workspaces, is looking for contributions that engage the idea of workspace at a variety of scales and across history, politics and geography.

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