The transformation of work lies at the centre of our social and political present and future.  This panel explores dimensions of this transformation through a relational approach to work and traverses the possibilities it offers to re-imagine work futures.

This includes:

• Interrogating the implications of how existing conceptual and analytical frames of labour and work are understood and mobilised by researchers and how these might be rethought to understand work futures.
• Exploring everyday work environments, workers’ experiences, creativity, routines and such in relation to futures
• Asking how automation, robotisation and digitalisation might be investigated and understood in relation to work futures.

The panel will engage with, contest, and shift dominant discourses where emerging technologies inhabit work futures shaped and visioned by critical theory, techno-solutionist politics, capital flows and media dystopia. In doing so, it will seek to advance new narratives towards plausible, ethical and inclusive work futures, and propose which concepts and methods will allow us to apprehend transformations in work futures while orienting us to an interventional research paradigm.

Each participant will give a short statement (3 min) answering the questions posed by the panel and propose their take on work futures.