I am an assistant professor in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. I received my Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Southern California. Since then, my research has revolved around labor, affect, technology, and capitalism. I am currently working on two book-length projects on compromised existence – the states of hopefulness that sustain us in a milieu where optimism runs thin.
The first project Passionate Work, published in 2022 (Duke University Press), examines how passionate work has come to reconfigure ideas of the good life, reframing what workers can hope for to stretch their capacities of tolerance. I navigate between the two typical ways of thinking about passion – its celebration by career coaches and celebrities, and its denouncement by critics who describe it as a form of exploitation – highlighting the purpose that passionate work plays in enabling forms of compromised life after the Great Recession.
The second project, Work’s Plasticity, showcases how twenty-first-century digital labor is envisioned as a cure for existential instability in the twenty-first century. Historically, work has always been understood to cultivate human plasticity. The use of of muscle, joints, and brain is understood to transform the body and mind, setting forth a path for evolutionary becoming. Though this Larmackian hypothesis has been refuted, the implementation of computational media into work since the twentieth-century has closely followed the politics of such plasticity. Digital labor has been disposed towards transforming the human subject, directing adaptation to the new insecurities of the twenty-first century. Work’s Plasticity details these experiments, showing how digital labor is entwined with imaginaries of a racially structured form of bearable future.
You can learn more about my research and contact me at renyihong [at] nus [beep] edu [boop] sg
Renyi Hong 