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.