Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness Book Talk with Dr. Emily Lim Rogers
This event will take place in-person (20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor, New York, NY) and on Zoom
Please join the Center for Disability Studies and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis for a celebration of Dr. Emily Lim Rogers’s debut book from Duke University Press.
In Sick Work, Rogers shows the unpaid labor it takes to be recognized as sick in the United States. Through a historical and ethnographic account of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)—a disease defined by disproportionate exhaustion after any form of exertion, which has no cures or treatments—she reveals how changing formations of labor decide what counts as disability and what does not. Sickness, she writes, is not work’s opposite. Rather, people with ME/CFS are forced to do their own labor of disease advocacy, or “sick work,” even as their symptoms prevent many from working paid jobs. Examining the everyday lives of people with ME/CFS and their activist movements, Sick Work demands a radical transformation of how work is defined and valued.
Use code E26WORK for 30% off when you pre-order the book on the Duke University Press website.
This event is free and open to the public but requires registration.
ASL and live captions will be provided.
Please email accessibility needs as they relate to this event to kgotkin@nyu.edu.
Emily Lim Rogers is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and a graduate of NYU’s American Studies PhD program (2021). Currently, she is beginning research for a new project on the multiplicitous politics of alternative medicine in the US.