Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Sunday 03 November
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Remote assistants respond to calls and emails. Life coaches assist with personal decisions. Smartphone apps tell us where to eat dinner. Nameologists help choose names for babies that will be raised by live-in au pairs.
Welcome to an emerging world, where the individual is a client in every interaction. Traditional functions of family and friends have been replaced by hired help and consultants. It may save us time, but what do we lose by handing over control of our personal lives to third-parties? Who are we if our jobs, our houses, our furniture, and our spouses are all recommended to us by experts or algorithms? If we are the sum of our decisions, then what’s left when those decisions have been handed over entirely to others?
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild looks at the long-term consequences of a frictionless existence and the implications of replacing the community with a marketplace in favour of faster, lonelier lives.
Arlie Hochschild is a professor emerita of sociology at University of California, Berkeley. She is author of several books, including The Outsourced Life: Intimate Life in Market Times and The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling.
Brought to you by the Wheeler Centre. Presented by Sydney Opera House and St James Ethics Centre.
Featuring
Arlie Hochschild
Arlie Hochschild is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of eight books, including The Outsourced Self, The Second Shift, and So How’s the Family? And Other Essays.
In Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers (co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich) she explores the global migration of care workers and in The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, she examines how we keep personal life feeling “personal” even as we turn to the market to meet ever more of our needs. In So How’s the Family? And Other Essays, she lays out the powerful links between government policy, social class and family.
Among other awards, she has received the Jessie Bernard Award, the Charles Cooley Award, and the Award for Public Understanding of Sociology from the American Sociological Association, as well as Guggenheim, Fulbright and Ford fellowships. Three of her books have been named to the New York Times ‘Notable Books of the Year’ list and plays have been based on two. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, at a seminar hosted by Pope John Paul II at Castel Gandolfo, and has been a keynote speaker at the annual conferences of the British, Scandinavian and American Sociological Associations.
Her work appears in sixteen languages.
Michael Williams
Michael Williams is the editor of The Monthly. He was previously the Artistic Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival. He has spent the past decade at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne as its ...