Short Abstract

This panel examines the spatial production of risk through the mobility of labour and capital. We invite ethnographic and conceptual engagements with the contradictions and inequalities that shape how risk is lived, managed, and transformed across global regimes of mobility.

Long Abstract

This panel explores the spatial production of risk through the interacting mobilities of labour and capital. Migration research shows how labour mobility is embedded in families, institutions and networks, while shaped by unequal global geographies of power premised on labour and capital. Studies of risk, meanwhile, suggest that it concerns both the realisation of external danger and the endangering of social values, mediating between individual decision-making and structural conditions. Today, labour mobility is increasingly shaped by financial capital’s penetration into the social reproduction of working lives among already vulnerable populations. The risks of labour, intensified by economic crisis, environmental danger and the privatisation of commons, intersect with financialised risks to propel migration, thereby producing further risks. Although risk is context-dependent and unevenly distributed, the interacting mobilities of labour and capital play into the production of risk as a universal category subject to private management and commodification, concealing inequalities and vulnerabilities based on class, race, gender, and ethnicity. Yet mobile people navigate multiple epistemologies of risk at once: their practices of hedging and taking risk imply active engagement with uncertain futures in pursuit of aspirations, even as these are shaped by the imperatives of capital and regimes of mobility. These processes expose contradictions between accumulation and dispossession that determine who bears risk and who profits from it. We invite papers examining how contradictions, inequalities and subjective experiences shape the relationship between risk and the mobility of labour and capital, e.g. in debt-financed migration, household indebtedness, or the financialisation of social protection.