Tonight’s Artivism Lab Speaker event was ‘Dreaming Big: A Teach-in on Media Panics, Academic Freedom, & The Intersectional University’. For someone like myself, who is just beginning her journey into formal activist work, it was an amazing opportunity to learn from speakers who engaged with activist work across a wide range of disciplines.
One of the moments this evening that spoke most deeply to me was Dr. RM Kennedy’s speech about the recent OPSEU strike action. It was something that I had followed closely at home, as my brother is currently studying at an Ontario college. One of things Dr. Kennedy mentioned were the two core images of the strike, that of the Instruct-o-bot and the zombie.
These images, of the robot and the zombie are both very closely linked to the idea of forced labour. It is fairly common knowledge that the word robot comes from the Czech robota, meaning ‘forced labour’. And it was just this weekend, in the discussion around the super bowl, I saw the tweet below. It was the first I had ever heard of the connection between zombies and slavery.
Certainly, I am not trying to say that the unfair working conditions experienced by the OPSEU workers are slavery, that is offensive to everyone involved. But I did find it interesting that over and over again, humans will associate cruel working conditions with the monstrous, with the inhumane.
The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists the “right to work” as one of the basic human rights. It is completely believable that whenever people feel their work conditions becoming unbearable, the first metaphors that come to mind are the ones in which workers feel themselves becoming inhuman. One begins to feel that only something more (or perhaps less) than human could continue to go on under the conditions they are presented with.
This sense of inhumanity, and the metaphor of both zombie and robot tie in well to Preston & Aslett’s article, “Resisting Neoliberalism from within the Academy: Subversion through an Activist Pedagogy”[i]. Early in their article they explain that within the core structure of neoliberalism is the elimination of an “engaged critique about its most basic principles” (503) and the “uncritical acceptance” (503) of those principles. This lack of thought about conditions ties in well to the image of the zombie and the robot, both creatures which have no free will or individual thought. It seems likely that those who promote neoliberalism would hold up the robot or zombie as an ideal worker and denigrate any individual who attempts to think for themselves or fight against the system.
I really appreciated that Dr. Kennedy brought up these symbols which were used by the protestors. I think that one of the most powerful elements of media activism is its ability to express thoughts through vectors other than words. The images of the robot and the zombie are powerful symbols for workers worldwide who can feel neoliberalism’s push towards inhuman work. By connecting to these images, activists can use the power of metaphor to tell a story and more effectively fight back.
[i] Preston, Susan and Jordan Aslett. “Resisting Neoliberalism from within the Academy: Subversion through an Activist Pedagogy”. Social Work Education, vol. 33, no. 4, 2014, pp. 502-518.