Events

The global pandemic restructured the locations and logic of paid work in profound ways, requiring many to work from home and setting society on a pathway that is transforming conventional boundaries between work and home. Be it the work-from-home office worker, the digital nomad or the precariously engaged gig worker, each one uses the home and neighbourhood in novel ways. This conference reflects on the social and infrastructural implications of this restructuring from a comparative perspective. 

How are domestic and neighbourhood infrastructures being drawn into this new era of work, and are current designs and facilities sufficient? How are the contours of work from home different in different contexts, and why?  Which sectors and which workers sustain home-based work and why? What policy responses are there to support or discourage it? What are the implications on digital equity? What are the infrastructural, design and household requirements of home-based work? Who carries that burden, and how does it manifest across lines of class? Further, how might these current and emergent trends in home-based work resonate with longer-held conventions of home-based paid work and the household innovations that accommodated that work?  

CONFERENCE THEMES

• Home-Based Work and the Digital World: Working from home and digital connectivity; Digitization of labour organization and performance; Digitization and the blurred lines between work and home life; Ethics of productivity. 
• Precarity in Flexible Work: Gig economy and the home; The domestic accommodation of informal work; Home-based small businesses and cottage industries; Ethics of Exploitation; Challenges in transitioning to regulation and formality; Home-based work and career advancement. 
• Paid Home-Based Work and the Domestic Sphere: Competing responsibilities of home-based work and social reproduction/caregiving; Home-based work’s mental load; Conflation of unpaid and paid labour; Traditions of paid work in the home (e.g., garment work, craftwork, and piecework). 
• The Spaces and Times of Home-Based Work: Architectural and temporal adaptations to the home to accommodate work; Home and neighbourhood design implications of home-based work; Home-based work and neighbourhood change; Work-away-from-office spaces (e.g., coworking/co-living, work pods); Changing relations between spaces and times of work life and domestic life. 

Please click on the links for more information:

Research Project: https://foundationsforhomebasedwork.com/
Conference Website: https://foundationsforhomebasedwork.com/conference

If you have any questions or concerns, please email foundationsforhbw@nus.edu.sg.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Assoc Prof Lilian Chee | Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore (Principal Investigator)
Prof Jane M. Jacobs | Division of Social Sciences, Yale-NUS College
Dr Natalie Pang | Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore
Prof Audrey Yue | Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore
Ms Rachel Sim | National University of Singapore (Research Assistant)
Ms Ruella Che | National University of Singapore (Research Assistant)