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- Convenors:
-
Michaela Pelican
(University of Cologne)
Tu Huynh
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- Format:
- Workshop
Short Abstract:
This panel reinterprets the relationship between coerced labor and capitalism, focusing on labor exploitation in the Global South. It explores how global and local labor systems interact, revealing racial and gender exclusions, and highlights pathways of resistance through commoning practices.
Long Abstract:
This panel reinterprets the relationship between coerced labor and capitalism by examining concepts and dynamics of labor exploitation. They highlight the emergence of new zones of labor exploitation and commodity production across colonial and postcolonial contexts in the Global South, shaped by varying world-economic requirements at different historical moments. The panel emphasizes the mutual formation and interrelation of global and local labor systems, showing how coerced labor in these settings is shaped by broader world-economic expansion. This perspective uncovers the temporal-spatial specificity of labor practices and their roles in sustaining capitalist accumulation. The panel aims to develop a conceptual framework and methodological procedures to better interpret these processes, linking global economic dynamics to local labor systems. Furthermore, the panel explores how these concepts have been co-opted by state and market actors to reinforce racialized and gendered exclusions, turning intended reforms into tools of oppression. The comparative analysis investigates the tension between commoning practices (collective resistance and solidarity) and uncommoning (withdrawing from capitalist co-optation), revealing how labor systems both resist and reinforce exploitative structures. By examining patterns of continuity and transformation in labor practices, the panel highlights how legal frameworks and state policies sustain exploitative labor systems under the guise of development, protection, or reform. Through commoning knowledge production, the panel challenges dominant narratives of labor exploitation within global racial capitalism and encourages solidarity-based approaches to labor justice by exploring both commoning and uncommoning practices as pathways for resistance.