Fifth Floor Special Sharing Session｜6.17 Speaking Out or Betraying? When Workers Stand at the Crossroads of Literature and Sociology

Lecture Introduction:

In 2020, an in-depth report on food delivery riders allowed the public to see the plight of platform practitioners, which caused widespread repercussions. In the past few years, Chinese social science researchers have sent out questionnaires, conducted interviews, or delivered food themselves, and then wrote their experiences and thoughts into papers and comments. The current situation of workers has become a continuous hot topic. Some people say that this is "sociology out of the circle", while others say that this is a new generation of workers supporting researchers, and the latter are utilitarian and cannot really speak for the former, because not only workers, but also social science researchers themselves have been "trapped in the system."

So, who can speak for the workers? We heard Chen Nianxi talk about "To Live is to Shout to the Sky", Hu Anyan talked about "I Deliver Express in Beijing", and Wang Jibing called himself "The Man in a Hurry". However, when these workers speak out and write about their individual experiences, some people say that these literary works consume suffering and satisfy the peeping of the lower classes. They are the profit-seeking and manipulation of publishers and the betrayal of workers to their own class. However, if the self-touching concern for the lower classes is worthy of vigilance, then the rude denial of voice is also harmful.

In fact, workers have demonstrated through their actions that what they learn is not important: by opening short videos and social platforms, we can easily find that "sociology" can be about "996.ICU" and "working people", and "literature" can also be "crazy social animal literature" and "second-party nonsense literature". For today's workers, diverse narratives have power and meaning, and expression is their right.

 

About the speaker:

 

Huang Ke is a young author and translator. He is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Paris-La Cité and the Paris Institute of Oriental Languages ​​and Civilizations. His main research areas are labor/labor sociology, platform capitalism and digital society. He received his master's degree from the French Institute of Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan and the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Louvain in Belgium. His novels and essays have been published in magazines such as "Mengya", "United Literature" and "Guangzhou Literature and Art". He has also published seven French-Chinese and English-Chinese translations.

 

Lecture information:

 

Fifth Floor Bookstore, 43 boulevard Haussmann, 75009 Paris

2023.6.17 (Saturday) 14:00-16:00

Price: 12 Euros per person (including drinks)