Paper short abstract:

This paper examines forms of worker mobilization in response to a crisis of social reproduction in the de-industrialized city of Tuzla in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and asks how can the experience and representations of a socialist life-world provide the grounds for forms of social membership built upon its absence?

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines diverse forms of social and political mobilization in response to what is articulated as a general crisis of social reproduction, centered on the loss of mass regularized employment in the post-socialist, de-industrialized city of Tuzla in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina. I look at the ways in which the workers of privatized and bankrupted industries have represented this crisis to incite particular kinds of responses (pity, solidarity, shame, obligation, rage) from a range of actors, including fellow workers, union officials, government representatives and fellow citizens. In particular I focus on the role played by the factory in these mobilizations: as metaphor, mediated image, staging ground, object of care, and site of struggle for, among other things, social inclusion. I ask, in what ways can the experience and representations of a socialist life-world provide the grounds for forms of social worth or social membership built upon its absence? In doing so I seek to reveal a nascent new mapping of "the social" that is, the conceptualization of society that provides the basis for thinking about problems and solutions, for how people organize themselves in their aim to sustain life and possibly produce a good life.