2022 Postgraduate Conference: 'After Work'

The 2022 Postgraduate Conference took place on 27th May 2022 at King's College, London, and had as its theme 'after work', with a keynote lecture by Dr. Elliot Evans (University of Birmingham).

After Work took up the insight that experiences of ‘after work’ may provide a vantage point from which to re-evaluate varied forms of workaday life. Panels considered the theme of ‘after work’ in relation to narrative fiction, the moving image, the reception of artworks and the worklessness of art in French and Francophone cultures, with papers treating themes including labour, sex/work, desire, (re)production, worklessness, utopia, globalism, and migration.

Inspired by the idea that, as researchers, we can have generative conversations about ongoing work when we are no longer at our desks (a notion that has been all the more apparent since the onset of the pandemic), the conference took the form of a work-in-progress seminar.

Selected papers from the conference formed the basis of a special issue of French Studies Bulletin, published in 2024.