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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents our participant observation among low-waged workers and discusses the findings in the light of recent anthropological theory on labor and working class.

Paper long abstract:

In the proposed paper we present our study of the uneasy relationship between race and class in the context of flexible production. Based on fieldwork among low-waged workers in spaces of production and spaces of class reproduction we discuss the concept of "surplus population", the reproduction of class hierarchies as well as urban relegation of racially stigmatized groups and the ways how workers respond to the structural processes which rend their lives, pasts and futures disposable.

Our study is based on participant observation and narrative interviews we conducted in post-socialist factory workplaces and beyond located in the region of West Bohemia. Concentrating on the factory as well as spaces beyond the factory (such as cheap lodging houses and low quality municipal houses) as social spaces we study the ways how workers envision their futures as alternative - both adapting and resisting - to the structurally imposed futures of dispossession.