Monthly Archives: April 2022

Labour in Second-hand – Workshop 3

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

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.