Dear Feminist Research Collective, Faculty, Workers,

Return to Senderis an art-activism workshop that is just peeking its head out of the planning stage for the first time. It extends our project, The Laboring Self,for The Dallas Museum of Art where we will be artists-in-residence at the Center for Creative Connections from October-December 2017. This critical labor workshop engages anyone who has or will be part of the workforce.

In this 60-minute workshop, participants will:

• Understand connections between nineteenth-century texts and art that sought to raise awareness and impact legislation for unregulated work and draw parallels to Return to Sender and the need for twenty-first century public awareness and regulation for crowdsourced labor.
• Describe what digital labor is and the unique challenges of the crowdsourced production of goods and services.
• Learn the present state of invisible crowd workers in the sharing economy.
• Create artifacts that represent the disembodied crowdworker for use in an activist event and explain how this is a present day analog to historical labor strikes, which were conducted by laborer and citizen-activist alike.
• Analyze how their own bodies may be sites of labor or how their bodies participate in 21st century labor.
• Participate in an ongoing art project in dialog with Mechanical Turk workers
• Make their own “Hired Hand” to keep or send as mail art

All are welcome (Deans, Faculty, Staff, Students) to the virtual factory experience at the FRC this week, 12-1pm in the skyline conference room, ATC 3.225. For more information, see http://visiblewomen.net/return-to-sender.html

Sincerely,

xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman