Reimagining Labor for a Sustainable Future (Routledge Studies in Sustainability)

This book provides an original contribution to contemporary research surrounding the environmental, humanitarian and socio-political crises associated with contemporary capitalism.

Reimagining Labor for a Sustainable Future is guided by the assertion that new systems are always preceded by new ideas and that imagination and experimentation are central in this process. Given the vast terrain of capitalism – processes, institutions, and stakeholders – Vogelaar and Dasgupta have selected labour as the point of engagement in the study of capitalist and alternative imaginaries. In order to demonstrate the importance of labour in rethinking and restructuring our world economy, the authors examine three diverse community projects in Scotland, India and the United States. They reveal the nuanced ways in which each community engages in commoning practices that re-center social reproduction and offer more expansive views of labour that challenge the neoliberal capitalist imaginary.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable economics, labour studies and sustainable development.

Alison E. Vogelaar is an independent scholar whose research and writing focus on the themes of representation, marginalization, justice and sustainability. She has published numerous academic articles, two co-edited volumes (The Discourses of Environmental Collapse and Nature and City: Changing Representations, 1960s-1970s) and is presently working on two pieces about labor in contemporary higher education. She was a tenured Associate Professor at Franklin University Switzerland from 2008-2021.

Poulomi Dasgupta is an Associate Professor of Economics at Franklin University Switzerland, with research interests in political economy, development economics, postcolonial economics, labour and labour movements and sustainable development. She is also a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. Her work on employment generation is The Job Guarantee: Toward Full Employment and her work on sustainable development is Rethinking Economics - Experiences from Plural Socio-Economic Higher.