Enchanting Pedagogy: Creating Labor Games in the Extractive University

Abstract

Through ethnographic fieldwork as a Teaching Assistant (TA) at the University of California, Berkeley, I advance that pedagogical labor can be conceptualized as two labor games. In the didactic game, I utilize hierarchical lecturing to simplify complex concepts in the pursuit of student comprehension of material, while the experiential game centers nonhierarchical dialogue and students’ personal experiences to promote consciousness-raising. TAs’ ability to create and switch between games underpins my broader theorization of labor games as one of two types: institutional games – shared among workers in similar structural circumstances and persistent across worker entry and exit – and innovation games – created by individual workers with relative autonomy amidst an absence of worker co-presence. Just as institutional games provide a template for obscuring and securing the extraction of surplus value under monopoly capitalism, innovation games do the same for the increasingly flexible, autonomous capitalism of the twenty-first century.