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- Convenors:
-
Marcos Lopes Campos
(Humboldt UniversityCebrap)
Pranav Kuttaiah (University of California, Berkeley)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks papers that illuminate the rephrased question posed by Ferguson and Li: how should we understand and describe the processes of making a living in the urban world beyond and in between the ‘proper job’?
Long Abstract:
Urban idioms for ad-hoc strategies, such as 'corres' (Brazil), 'tunahustle' (Kenya), 'jugaad' (India), and 'parking' (Jakarta), describe how people navigate life. These world-making projects sit in tension with long-held metanarratives of development, especially the “proper job” (Ferguson and Li, 2018). New theorizing has pointed to the need to go beyond the categories, assumptions and descriptive parameters mobilized in analyzing life-building strategies among the urban poor through the time-space formations of ‘development’ and/or ‘progress’. Concepts like ‘transitoriness’ (Caldeira), ‘forms of collective life’ (Bhan et al.), ‘surround’ (Simone), and ‘lives worth living’ (Naroztky, Besnier) offer new vocabularies to address the complexity of contemporary urban life. More deeply, they challenge the entrenched chronotope of ‘progress” – entangled to expectations of upward mobility, autoconstruction, work and solidarities, and other forms of being. Despite this, we acknowledge that certain teleologies, categories, expectations persist and have tangible effects, ‘colliding’ with contemporary urban ways of making do. This tension reflects the material and affective legacy of 20th-century socio-technical interventions. This panel seeks papers that illuminate the rephrased question posed by Ferguson and Li: how should we describe the processes of making a living in the beyond and in between the ‘proper job’? What new meanings are emerging from these activities, and how do they interact with traditional categories like work, home, and family? We encourage papers centered on new work or living arrangements, aspirational strategies, modes of planning or collective action that disrupt the ‘scenes of constraint’ (Butler) against which they operate to produce novel time-space formations.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I examine what it means to work as an Adivasi artist in post-colonial India and what it means to think about Adivasi art as ‘work’, especially in a context of socio-economic marginality which marked the ‘tribal’ or Adivasis as a negative and a-temporal cultural other.
Paper long abstract:
The article is situated in a Pardhan Gond Adivasi (‘scheduled tribes’ or ‘indigenous people’) art-world in central India. The analysis emerges from an ethnographic observation that artists refer to the process of art-making and the art-objects as ‘kaam’ or 'work'. I privilege this observation in my analysis to understand how the Adivasi artists invoked qualities of their work and its effect to claim a legitimate place and agency in spaces and institutions that have previously excluded them or represented them in essentialist frames. With ethnographic observations about the lives of artists, art-making, and the experiences of working in powerful state institutions, I examine what it means to work as an Adivasi artist in post-colonial India and the political possibilities in thinking about making Adivasi art as ‘work’, especially in a context of socio-economic marginality which marked the ‘tribal’ or Adivasis as a negative and a-temporal cultural other. I argue that the social category of work comes to have an emic relevance to the Adivasi lifeworlds and histories. It allows for claims and experiences of dignity in their labor, inclusion, and a rewriting of their historical representations. The article will discuss the kinds of everyday livelihood strategies and negotiations that previously marginalized communities in the global South (like the Adivasis) use to claim dignity and social inclusion; while at the same time, these strategies can further divide and produce hierarchies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the experiences and motivations of self-proclaimed 'proper jobseekers' in Johannesburg. The activity of searching for proper work affords people access social and material benefits as it is carried out, in turn changing how and why people valorise formal work.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the experiences and motivations of self-proclaimed 'proper jobseekers' in urban and peri-urban Johannesburg, South Africa. Many young unemployed persons continue to spend long periods actively looking for formal wage labour, thus seemingly buying into and re-enforcing the significance of 'proper work' in a context of mass-unemployment and decreasing access to stable employment. The social activity of searching for formal work, however, offers a number of social and material benefits as it is carried out. And crucially, these benefits are only partially tied to the outcome of people's search. Far from blinded by the 'fantasy future' (Guyer) of formalised work, Johannesburg's poor unemployed are often keenly aware that their search will not lead to stable wage labour. By positioning themselves as 'proper workers in waiting', however, they are able to access novel forms of institutional belonging, re-negotiate their position within existing social networks, and craft less-than-formal livelihoods. In turn, they can also maintain a degree of separation from the often villainised figure of the 'lazy unemployed youth' in contemporary South Africa. This paper therefore builds on existing works on 'waithood' (Honwana) and unemployed 'timepass' (Jeffrey), as well as the large literature on the plurality of contemporary livelihood strategies, to explore the act of searching for wage labour as a form of 'making do' in itself. Even as young people continue to idealise wage labour, then, they also re-formulate the valorisation of wage labour by building lives in the in-between of bare unemployment and 'proper work.'
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how platform delivery workers in Bogotá conceive of independence through the idea of "working without a boss." Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it focuses on how workers assert value and autonomy over time by examining how they navigate intersecting "timescapes."
Paper long abstract:
In March 2023, a draft labour reform in Colombia, supported by labour unions, proposed granting platform delivery workers employment status. The aim was to provide labour rights and social protections associated with "proper" employment, defined by subordinate status. However, many workers opposed the reform. Their objections were rooted in a strong sense of independence, encapsulated in the idea of "working without a boss."
Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with predominantly Venezuelan migrant platform delivery workers in Bogotá, my research takes this opposition as a starting point to explore what “working without a boss" means in their daily lives. In this presentation, I unpack workers' valuation of autonomy over time arguing that academic discussions of the gig economy often reduce these claims to a mere internalization of neoliberal values because of their exclusive focus on market-imposed time. Conversely, I show that delivery workers navigate multiple, intersecting "timescapes" (Bear, 2016), where market time constantly interacts with, and is negotiated against, other bodily and social rhythms. This perspective allows us to understand the expression of time agency as a constant possibility.
By taking my interlocutors' claims of independence seriously, I suggest that they represent a radical effort to reassert the primacy of life over work, challenging perspectives that view waged labour as universally desirable. Ultimately, I focus on precarity not only as a site of violence and exploitation but also as a space with the political potential to critique the normativity of capitalist wage-labour and consider what might lie beyond it.
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnographic study, I seek to understand ways of making a living developed by app drivers in Rio de Janeiro around different work platforms - such as Uber, 99 and Instagram.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I conduct an ethnographic study of a small family business that provides mentoring and manages a paid group for more than 200 app drivers in Rio de Janeiro. I analyze how those app drivers constructs digital work platforms - whether mobility apps or social networks - as ways of “making a living” (Álvarez and Perelman, 2020) beyond on-demand work. For these drivers, their earnings on mobility platforms alone do not ensure their material well-being or their aspirations for a "dignified life" (Fernández Álvarez, 2017). I observed that the mentoring expands driver's "horizons of expectations” (De L'Estoile, 2020) since they are encouraged by their mentor to create opportunities beyond the mobility platforms. For instance, several of my interlocutors invest considerable time and resources into becoming digital influencers for other app drivers. Therefore, I examine how the "platformization of work" reshapes the life aspirations of social actors whose experiences are often misinterpreted when analyzed through traditional frameworks, such as the concept of a "proper job" (Ferguson and Li, 2018). In summary, this paper invites a deeper exploration of how social actors in the Global South collectively navigate and create opportunities for themselves in a changing labor world.
Paper short abstract:
For Indian Muslim woodworkers ‘apna kām’ (own work) articulates labour independence and agency. However, via novel debt/credit relations it is incorporated into modalities of labour bondage within circuits of local and global commodity production.
Paper long abstract:
Amongst woodworkers in Muslim mohallas (neighbourhoods) of the North Indian city of Saharanpur, notions of jugād (making do) and milansār (conviviality) form vernaculars of urban survival. Ideals of a ‘proper job’ are also prevalent. Counter, however, to discourses of modernity which situate ‘proper jobs’ as formalised and (supposedly) dis-embedded, woodworkers preface notions of ‘apna kām’ (own work) that foregrounds artisanal modes of production, social embeddedness, Islamic ideals, and – to degrees – neoliberal ‘entrepreneurialism’. I ethnographically detail agentive aspects of apna kām – as a life-building and self-making strategy – but also attend to ‘scenes of constraint’. Here, I turn away from (but don’t dismiss) the performative (per Butler’s usage) to foreground materiality. I focus on debt/credit relations that are constituted through temporalities of ‘sticky money’. The ‘delayed’ or ‘partial payments’ this embodies, bind woodworkers to individual exporters and wholesalers. Empirically, I argue, these relations invert normative anthropological/sociological ideas of debt/credit which assume power relations that favour the creditor. ‘Sticky money’, I contend, produces novel time-space formations that penetrate ‘the surrounds’ AbdouMaliq Simone articulates as constituting agentive urban informality, via novel debt/credit relations to incorporate apna kām into modalities of labour bondage within circuits of local and global commodity production.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how notions of dependency and development shape an intervention by the South African state into livelihoods amid mass joblessness. These temporalities collide in practice, enabling the articulation of new meanings and claims for state support by target populations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines how the temporalities of “development” and “dependency” shape livelihoods, aspirations, and claim-making in South Africa’s Community Work Programme (CWP). In recognition of the structural nature of mass unemployment, the post-apartheid state sought to create an “employment safety net” for the poor, offering temporally indefinite cash stipends in return for community development work. Features like work conditionalities and part-time work were intended to prevent beneficiaries’ long-term reliance on state support, orienting them instead towards the continued search for work and economic independence. For participants, these temporalities collide. Caught between an ever-receding horizon of the “proper job”, and highly precarious livelihoods in the present, they articulate a sense of “stuckness” after years in the programme, unable to give shape to aspirations of forward and upward mobility. These collisions animate surprising claims on the state. A newly formed labour union suggests the return of workerist claims, demanding that precarious part-time work be upgraded into “proper employment”. It also articulates distinctly post-apartheid expectations for personal transformation. Appropriating official discourses of skills training and entrepreneurship, union leaders challenge the lack of state support to enable participants’ movement towards economic independence. In doing so, they apparently affirm discursive linkages between work and development, but leverage them to insist on the state’s central responsibility for direct distribution and to facilitate social mobility. These claims do not mark a clear departure from a work-based social and moral order; rather, they show how new visions for state-citizen entanglements emerge as subtle reformulations of established chronotopes.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how notions of the 'proper job' are complicated in contexts of migration. Foregrounding experiences of Syrian and Ukrainian newcomers in Berlin, Germany, the paper traces how state-level ideas of eligibility and progress collide with newcomers' own future-building projects.
Paper long abstract:
This paper further complicates the notion of the 'proper job' by considering the ways in which newcomers’ employment trajectories and future aspirations collide with state-level labour policies and discourses around migrant and refugee work.
When adult newcomers physically arrive in Germany (refugees and non-EU migrants in particular) they are generally not permitted to formally engage in paid labour. Instead, they undergo an often years-long process of what Gowayed (2022) has termed 'credentialization', during which they are required to learn German and have their degrees and qualifications assessed for their 'eligibility' on the German labour market.
Based on over seven years of ethnographic research within state-run language classrooms and employment offices, I show that while Germany’s extensive integration and professional recognition procedures officially aim to accelerate newcomers’ socioeconomic mobility, in practice, they significantly delay their access to employment, higher education and citizenship (see also Schulte 2024). It is in these spaces of delay, however, where newcomers’ own future-building projects collide with state-level notions of progress and employability. Importantly, these collisions bring discussions of proper employment and ways of making a living to the forefront, revealing a key tension between newcomers’ aspirations for life in Germany and policy and public discursive expectations of ‘suitable’ migrant labour. Drawing on interviews with Syrian and Ukrainian newcomers and observations of their interactions with German state bureaucrats, this paper hones in on these spaces of collision, tracing strategies newcomers employ to attain secure and long-term working conditions.