Labour in Second-hand Workshop
Workshop 3 in the Second-hand Challenges Workshop Series
29th April 2022, 2-5pm UK time, Online, Free
To join, please email paysonAB (at) cardiff.ac.uk
**All participants can receive a £20 voucher for The Charity Shop Gift Card
The second-hand economy takes a lot of labour. There is work involved in sorting and disposing of household waste, repairing goods like a phone or a pair of children’s trousers, or repurposing them, divesting and reselling clothes and other goods online, in a charity or thrift shop or at a market, building relationships and networks, sorting out accounts, among other tasks.
All these vital second-hand processes take skilled, sometimes risky, often poorly paid or unpaid labour. Yet second-hand labour goes largely unrecognised, even as recent evaluations chart the value of second-hand markets in the tens of billions of dollars (Statista, 2022). And second-hand workers locally in the UK, and around the world, face a complex range of issues that invite our attention.
This workshop focuses on understanding and responding to the challenges of second-hand labour. We will hear from researchers and industry practitioners thinking about and doing different forms of second-hand labour, historically and in the present, followed by discussion and brainstorming about the future of second-hand work.
Provisional Programme, subject to updated titles/topics, and an addition or two!
Part 1 & 2 – Lightning talks and Q&A
- Dr Julie Botticello, UEL, “Unpicking a dirty economy: Extracting maximum value from second-hand clothing and rag reprocessing workers” (see her work here and the here)
- Dr Michael Palm, UNC-Chapel Hill, talking about ‘listing labor’, consumer labor, and online second-hand reselling
- Dr Cheryl Roberts, Royal College of Art, looking at 20th century practices to reuse waste and ‘material knowledge and material literacy’ in second-hand shopping
- Brenda Mondragón Toledo and Diana Morales, ‘From the ‘tianguis‘ to Instagram: Secondhand Markets in Puebla-Tlaxcala, Mexico’
- Dr Jen Ayres – on ‘the work of shopping’ and workers in Big Thrift, reselling pressures and ‘hazards’, and her own second-hand jewellery business
- Alex Osborne and Megan Thomas, Disability Wales, talking about disabled people’s employment (whether paid or not), their rights, and the support that is available for disabled people seeking work or while in work
- Nathaniel Kidd, Retail Support Manager – People, Acorns, ‘Volunteering in Charity Retail’.
Part 3 – Discussion and collaborative problem-solving around challenges of labour in second-hand
- Discussion and guided, collaborative problem-solving around issues in second-hand labour
- Bring a thick pen and a sheet or two of paper!
We hope you can join us!
For more on the first two workshops in the series, see Waste & Reuse (25th Feb 2022) and Repair: Materials, Techniques, Communities (25th March 2022)
This workshop is funded by a Cardiff University ESRC-Impact Accelerator Award and the School of Journalism, Media & Culture (JOMEC) at Cardiff University.