Short Abstract

Work ‘moves us’ for a major part of our lives, moves us in materialistic and political ways, but also in its sociocultural and affective dimensions. This panel explores new perspectives in the anthropology of labour regarding technological transformations like digitization and platformization.

Long Abstract

Work ‘moves us’ for a major part of our lives, moves us in materialistic and political ways, but also in its sociocultural and affective dimensions. The anthropology of work and labour has always addressed questions on the embeddedness of production regimes on various scales, ranging from global commodity chains, state structures and policies, neighbourhoods and families, to the workplace, asking what relations of dependency, exploitation, solidarity are produced in particular contexts.

In this panel we aim to explore the ongoing crisis of work, the precarization or informalization of employment, and the devaluing of knowledge and skills triggered by the threat of recent technological transformations – digitization, platformization, financialization. How do these processes unevenly affect different worlds of work across agricultural, manufacturing and service sectors and across all kinds of geographies of production, and with what political ramifications?

We invite contributions that scrutinize the relation between labour processes and labour relations in specific work contexts – from global assembly lines to mobile gig work and coerced click work. What are the affective and political aspects of newly emerging dependencies in the digital work regimes today, and how do they impinge on persistent “analogous” ones? Furthermore, we invite participants to explore the methodological challenges these changes entail for the anthropology of labour; how insights and analytical tools developed in Fordist work contexts remain essential to illuminate them and to what extent they invite critical reflection or new approaches in the discipline.