Steffan Blayney
Historian and former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow whose work focuses on the relations between health, the body, and society; author of Health & Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body.
Top 3 podcasts with Steffan Blayney
Ranked by the Snipd community
Mar 23, 2026 • 44min
Steffan Blayney, "Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body" (Activist Studies of Science, 2022)
Steffan Blayney, historian of health and labor turned labor organizer, explores how 19th–20th century science recast workers as machines. He discusses mechanical metaphors, the medicalization of fatigue, time-and-motion visualizations, Taylorism and assembly lines, and how efficiency ideas migrated into wellness, advertising, and modern labor struggles.
Mar 23, 2026 • 44min
Steffan Blayney, "Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body" (Activist Studies of Science, 2022)
Steffan Blayney, historian and former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, studies how health was reframed around worker efficiency in Britain. He explores how bodies were modeled as machines, fatigue became a pathology, and efficiency logic spread into culture and labor practices. The conversation links these histories to modern tech, wellness culture, and moments of worker resistance.
Mar 23, 2026 • 44min
Steffan Blayney, "Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body" (Activist Studies of Science, 2022)
Steffan Blayney, a historian and former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, explores how late 19th–early 20th century science recast the worker as a machine. He discusses thermodynamic and time-motion models, fatigue reframed as pathology, the spread of efficiency into everyday life, parallels with modern productivity culture, and how workers and unions pushed back against these logics.
