Planet Work

Ryan Hediger is a professor of English at Kent State University in Ohio. He is the author of Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment, editor of Animals and War, coeditor of Animals and Agency, and is currently writing a monograph on labor norms and settler colonialism.    

Introduction: Denaturalizing the Slow Violence of Work
Ryan Hediger
Section One: Questioning “Anthropocene” Frames
Chapter 1: What’s Past is Prologue: The Dragon, the Phoenix, and the Golden Spike
David L. Rodland
Chapter 2: Anthropocene Performance: Work without Ends
Ted Geier
Section Two: Rethinking Work in the Anthropocene
Chapter 3: Unfree Labor: Slavery and the Anthropocene in the Americas
Ryan Hediger
Chapter 4: The Rise of the Novel and the Narrative Labor of Horses in the English Novel of the Early Anthropocene
Sinan Akıllı
Chapter 5: Reconstruction Agrarianism in Douglass and Burroughs: Relational Labor Against White Supremacist Ownership
Daniel Clausen
Chapter 6: The Work of the Globe: How the Unisphere, Icon of the 1964-65 World’s Fair, Illuminates the Nature of Modern Work
James Armstrong
Chapter 7: Leisure and Light Work: Coming of Age in Wendell Berry’s and Thomas Pynchon’s Novels of Extraction
Matt Wanat
Section Three: Learning from Leisure in the Anthropocene
Chapter 8: Walking the Line between Leisure and Labor: Dorothy Wordsworth and Harriet Martineau in the English Lake District
Amanda Adams
Chapter 9: Labor, Leisure and Love of Country: Rangering in the Age of the Alt-NPS
Jennifer K. Ladino
Chapter 10: Learning to Play in the Anthropocene: Winter Recreation and the Politics of Climate Change
Will Elliot and Kevin Maier
Chapter 11: Weaving “Lifeworkings”: Goanna Walking between Humanism and Posthumanism, Dharug Women’s Way
Jo Rey
Coda
Pedagogical Anthropo/Scenes: Reviving Craft in the Academy
Sharon O'Dair
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index