Paper short abstract:

In this paper we use a feminist perspective to take a comparative and long-term view of the effects of capital mobility on entangled processes of deindustrialization and place loss to consider strategies used by different generations to counter the these effects and envisage possible futures.  

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we use a feminist perspective to take a comparative and long-term view of the effects of deindustrialization and downsizing by drawing on ethnographies of industrial work and life in South America and Central and Eastern Europe. The paper explores the effects of hypermobile capital on the world of work, which we understand to be closely entangled with processes of "place loss" (Filipucci 2010) and the erosion of attachments, identities and relationships. A corollary to the decline of secure employment as a consequence to changes in capitalist accumulation, we consider the important effects of these processes on people's sense of worth and the social and political recognition gained historically through individual and collective struggle. As the very experience of work changes, and individuals and communities contemplate the possibility of becoming 'disposable people' (Giroux 2009), we ask how and to what extent 'generational discourse' (Foster 2013) might provide a lens through which to understand the vicissitudes of history and so reconnect to the struggles of the past, and whether this might either hinder or encourage people's ability to define new aims and hopes and devise new forms of solidarity and struggle.  Where relations in the sphere of production are shattered by the breakdown of work places, how  might the affective social relations of reproduction sustained through kinship, household and generational relationships be fostered, maintained or re-invented ?