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- Convenors:
-
Larisa Kurtovic
(University of Ottawa)
Andrew Gilbert (University of Toronto)
- Chair:
-
Lindsay DuBois
(Dalhousie University)
- Discussants:
-
Andrea Muehlebach
(University of Toronto)
Gavin Smith (Australian National University)
Gavin Smith (University of Toronto)
- Stream:
- Worlds in motion: Worlds, Hopes and Futures/Mondes en mouvement: Mondes, espoirs et futurs
- Location:
- FSS 1007
- Start time:
- 4 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The dismantling of once-dominant Fordist forms of sociopolitical and economic organization has forced millions to remake their lives amidst an uncertain future. This panel documents and theorizes how life and politics are being made from within this changing landscape.
Long Abstract:
The dismantling of the once-dominant Fordist forms of sociopolitical and economic organization has forced millions to remake their lives amidst an uncertain future. This is true both for those who experienced the disciplining embrace and material effects of these forms, as well as those for whom such forms remained a distant aspiration. The post-Fordist era has witnessed the disappearance of certain modes of production, consumption, and accumulation, especially those that once guaranteed mass employment and animated an industrialized utopia. Of course, some welcome the disruption of the industrialism that underwrote Fordist models, with its arrogant belief in mastering the Earth and attendant ecological devastation. Others lament the passing of work(er)-based forms of sociality and social membership, which accompany the slow—yet also likely permanent—disappearance of waged forms of life. Indeed, as the Fordist social contract between state and worker/citizen is coming undone, so are the institutions designed to stabilize social reproduction and secure life courses. Much scholarship has rightly documented the precarity, loss, abjection and nostalgia attending such transformations. Yet this is not the whole story. This panel seeks papers that document and theorize how life and politics are being made from within this changing landscape. What lies in in the wake of Fordism and its promise of "mass utopia"? What forms of life and visions for the future has the collapse of these powerful cosmologies created? And what kinds of political projects emerge out of this ruination?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the rhetoric and practice of the anti-fascist organisation - Hope not Hate - this paper critically examines the emergence of post-class politics in the urban neighbourhoods of post-industrial Brexit-Britain.
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides an anthropological analysis of the social, economic and political conditions that have given rise, in Britain, to a right-of-centre populist politics of cultural nationalism. This cultural nationalism is the background against which emergent forms of resistance are arising, such as the new initiatives of the grassroots anti-fascist organisation, Hope not Hate, whose current focus on 'left-behind communities', brings attention to those predominantly white working class urban communities alienated from a post-industrial society that has never represented their interests.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes collective actions by unemployed workers in the deindustrial Bosnian city of Tuzla to suggest how care—demanding it, giving it, receiving it—is a potent site where life and politics are being made after Fordism.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes collective actions by unemployed workers in the deindustrial Bosnian city of Tuzla, protesting the erosion of the socialist social contract that underwrote Bosnia's work-based model of human flourishing and emancipation. I begin with the fact that nearly all political demands articulated by these workers had care at their core: workers demanded to be cared about by being cared for (and vice versa). In part, these actions were attempts to conjure relations of obligation by authorities to provide the social, economic, and material infrastructure necessary for workers to realize their own capacity to care for others. Indeed, it was their inability to fulfill inter-generational obligations of care, rooted in Fordist modes of social reproduction, that animated worker actions. I focus on how these actions self-consciously placed unemployed workers in positions of risk and vulnerability that proliferated participant roles of giving and receiving care, and thus produced new, sometimes ephemeral, sometimes lasting relations of (inter)dependence that de-legitimized local government. The analysis thus suggests some of the ways in which care—demanding it, giving it, receiving it—is a potent site where life and politics are being made after Fordism.
Paper short abstract:
Can futures be forged out of ruins—both material and ideational? This paper interrogates the imaginative force and material grounding of one such recuperative future-making project, by focusing on the “Dita” detergent-producing factory in the northern Bosnian industrial town of Tuzla.
Paper long abstract:
Can futures be forged out of ruins—both material and ideational? This paper interrogates the imaginative force and material grounding of one such recuperative future-making project, by focusing on the "Dita" detergent-producing factory in the northern Bosnian industrial town of Tuzla. Formerly a part of a once successful chemical industrial complex, "Dita" was nearly decimated by postwar privatization—the violence of which transformed the factory into a cradle of a burgeoning new labor movement. For years, Dita's workers had been occupying the factory grounds in an effort to preserve what is left of a now a largely devastated industrial park. In the summer of 2015, with the help of their court-appointed bankruptcy manager, they re-started the production of its iconic products, in order to prove to the public and potential investors their factory was still viable. Their struggle for the factory in some ways reified market logics, particularly by imagining the solution to Dita's predicament through the sale of the company to a foreign investor. Yet workers' self-organized effort to produce a viable future for themselves and their families also could not have happened had they not been able to draw upon the political heritage of Yugoslav socialism—in particular the theory and practice of what was once known as "workers self-management." My paper demonstrates how workers' postsocialist imagination and their affective attachment to the materiality of their nearly decimated industrial park, actually made their struggle both imaginable and possible.
Paper short abstract:
In Spain, economic crisis and the dismantling of state forms of provisioning have recently given rise to a growing demand for dignity among large social sectors. This paper explores the paradoxical, contradictory relationship that this demand maintains with the erosion of a loosely defined Fordism.
Paper long abstract:
In 2008, Spain plunged into an ongoing economic crisis. Working class impoverishment and job scarcity have been compounded by the implementation of severe austerity policies that have further eroded an already precarious welfare state. The experience of the crisis has thus undermined and put in doubt the main hallmarks of Fordism—such as mass employment, the protective state, and the supposedly universal possibility to reach middle class status. In parallel, there have emerged a series of popular mobilizations criticizing the inequality and injustice of the current situation. This paper focuses on one striking characteristic of these mobilizations: the central role that they place on the demand of dignity. How are we to understand this demand? What relation does it maintain with the erosion of the Fordist framework of socioeconomic organization? To explore this question, I will leave behind the urban middle classes and the plazas where the indignados staged their revolt, and focus my attention on the semi-proletarian livelihoods of the inhabitants of Southern Catalonia. In this impoverished rural region, claims for dignity have saturated the sphere of the political since the 1970s, a circumstance that, I argue, has to do with the fact that there Fordist aspirations always remained elusive. My contention is that the Southern Catalan case offers a privileged window to understand the material conditions and practical consciousness that give rise to the current demand for dignity in Spain, allowing us to analyze the political content of this demand and its relationships with a vanishing Fordism
Paper short abstract:
What does it mean to be an entrepreneur in contemporary Brazil? In this contribution, I seek to address critically the issue of neoliberal and Post-Fordist "subjectivation" and its political, economic and reflective implications through an ethnographic focus on Brazilian startup companies.
Paper long abstract:
The phenomenon of entrepreneurship at large is closely tied to the spread of the neoliberal agenda as a process in which the state assumes a more technocratic and managerial role based on a belief in freedom of market, leading to deregulation, technologization, flexible working, liberalization of capital bringing about a complex array of forms of governance, self-governance and market agencements.
The image of the entrepreneur as "the neoliberal subject" (COOK, 2016: 142), an agent that dwells in this economic environment of risk and uncertainty, is an example of economic subjectivities that began to emerge from contingent conditions in different levels of vulnerability of the Post-Fordist era. Ethnographic approaches are beginning to complexify the understanding of entrepreneurialism, especially the work of Julia Elyachar (2005) in Cairo and Carla Freeman (2014) in the Caribbean, in order to produce a more textured account of the contemporary experience of living under changing socioeconomic structures.
In this contribution, I seek to continue on this critical perspective through an ethnographic focus on Brazilian startup companies, an ongoing research initiated in 2014. During fieldwork, my research subjects whilst striving to incorporate the ethics of the startup business scenario reflected upon their lives and visions of the future in the midst of Brazil's profound political and economic crisis situating their experience as entrepreneurs as a form of critique of neoliberalism. I propose to think about this emerging form of political project that takes shape in elite business landscapes.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation aims at explaining how the economic crisis is changing the meaning of work in Japan and more specifically what are the consequences of the flexibilization of the work regime for young workers in Tokyo.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation aims at explaining how the economic crisis is changing the meaning of work in Japan and more specifically what are the consequences of the flexibilization of the work regime for young workers in Tokyo. To do so, I will look at the articulation between work and social participation in examining how the work regime is creating important discontinuities and tensions between emerging practices and dominant representations. Based on interviews with young adults in Tokyo, I will discuss how young temporary workers are making sense of their job and how they define their participation and their role within what is becoming a flexible life. I would like to bring forward two "moments" of this life - the flexible labour and the individual experience - by examining how young temporary workers define their sense of belonging and their contribution to society. I would argue that these "moments" are ways of being, i.e. specific ways of thinking, feeling and acting the relationship to things, to others and to themselves. They are both a world of new opportunities, political commitment or participation. In other words, I seek to show how these moments translate a form of potentiality reflecting individual experiences of political economy through the articulation of a new definition of work and one's position in society. This approach will allow a better understanding of the relationship between representations, political economy, and the meaning of work for young adults in Tokyo in a context of economic hardship.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines contracting and subcontracting at oil projects in the Arabian Sea. I argue that contracting and subcontracting must be considered through the lens of migrant, manual labor, and I illustrate the political potential of networks in post-Fordist infrastructure projects.
Paper long abstract:
Building an offshore oilrig is a resource intensive activity - costing over half a billion dollars and requiring thousands of workers. Unlike large-scale infrastructure projects of the Fordist era, the state often seems to disappears from these projects. In the present-day, oil rigs are contracted and subcontracted out, and contracts are either between companies or between companies and workers. This process of contracting and subcontracting is discussed in business literature as a way for companies to overcome the challenges of maintaining technical expertise or knowledge in-house. This approach ignores the impact of subcontracting on semi-skilled and unskilled workers and obfuscates the ways in which laborers develop political projects to respond to the new working conditions imposed by subcontracting.
In this paper, I examine how contracting and subcontracting impacts management practices at oil rigs. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted from 2009 to 2011 in India and the United Arab Emirates, I argue that contracting and subcontracting must be considered through the lens of migrant, manual laborers. Applying this perspective opens a space to interrogate business practices and the management of workers. Here, I focus on safety practices as key moments where ideologies of contracting and labor management converge. Not only do I examine managers' rationales, but I investigate worker practices in regards to safety standards and job subcontracting. Juxtaposing these perspectives shows that mitigating risk is a central motivation for all parties and highlights the centrality of networks in spreading risk.