Paper short abstract:

Go to any free workshop on job hunting, and most advice assumes constant access to the internet. What do job seekers do when their access is not reliable? When you are poor, how do you look for a job when all employers presuppose that people have easy access to middle-class infrastructures?

Paper long abstract:

Mobile phones are technologies that signal people's class positions, often in unexpected ways in contexts where a government provides free phones with limited service. How mobile phones become an ethnographic starting point to study how class functions as a relational category of analysis is especially apparent when studying job searching techniques. If you stop almost anyone in the US and ask: "how do you look for a job?" many will recommend searching online. Go to any free workshop on job hunting, and most advice will tacitly assume constant access to the internet. To be employed, one must have reliable access to a range of digital technologies. What do job seekers do when their access is not reliable? When you live on the poverty line, how do you look for a job when all employers seem to presuppose that people have easy access to middle-class infrastructures?

The job-seekers we interviewed had unreliable access to mobile phones and the internet, they were dependably digitally unstable. What happens when job-seekers are operating in a media ecology in which cell phone minutes are always available, but other factors (such as theft, homelessness, and broken equipment) continue to prevent stable connections to digital tools that might lead to employment? What does the mobile phone's vulnerabilities reveal about how the "unemployed" is socially constructed?

Paper short abstract:

Through an empirically informed analysis of the practices of a neighbourhood patrol in the peripheries of Rome, I chart the ways in which degentrification and migration in securitarian neoliberalism relationally shape class belonging in the urban space.

Paper long abstract:

As far-right ideologies spread over Europe and are often interpreted as political radicalization in response to intensified migration, less attention is given to the ways in which anti-immigrant ideologies are embedded in spatial and class dynamics in urban settings. Grounding my reflection in fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2017 on a neighbourhood patrol in the peripheries of Rome, I argue that the anti-immigrant turn in Europe needs to be analytically embedded in a scrutiny of class and space transformations in times of security-obsessed neoliberalism. On the one hand, guided by a profit-making logic and materialized through shady deals between construction magnates and the municipality, the recent construction of Roman peripheries intersects particular visions of class belonging threatened by processes of degentrification. While house values drop and infrastructure decays, class belonging needs to be fiercely defended by a revanchist city eager to protect its standing (Smith 1996). On the other hand, struggles around class belonging in the urban space occur relationally: instead of mobilizing politically against a local administration captured by the interests of capital, the revanchist city turns against a class more precarious than itself: the Roma, immigrants, and the Italian poor. It is against these that the revanchist city produces identities and coagulates communities in the security key. By claiming that their houses need to be defended against invading others, they mask their struggles around class belonging while (re)producing insecurities.

Reference

Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London and New York: Routledge.

Paper short abstract:

I argue that a relational view of class is relevant on the enterprise scale by analyzing how differences in the experiences of labor and dispossession, attitudes to mobility and stasis, and structural positions in terms of ownership get mapped onto a generational divide in a worker-owned company.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes ambiguous positions of, and divisions among, workers in the Croatian machine tool company ITAS Prvomajska. ITAS had gone through privatization during the 1990's, but ITAS workers, in 2006, used the bankruptcy process to convert the debt of the company into shares and acquire the controlling interest in the enterprise. Approximately half of the current employees had not worked there before the takeover. A generational divide has over time emerged as a shorthand that maps out other divisions in the company. The majority of old workers have spent their decades-long careers in ITAS and took part in the struggle for ownership; many of the new employees' experience of labor had been shaped in the wider context of Croatian post-socialism. Old workers tend to have shares and consider themselves company owners, whereas young workers do not. Old workers want to stay in the company until they can retire, whereas young workers tend to leave the company and town when opportunities arise. A view of class attuned to questions related to dispossession, labor, and space helps us grasp the differences among workers within the company that are based not solely on age, but, rather, tied to differences in the experiences of labor and struggle against dispossession, different attitudes to mobility and stasis, as well as different structural positions in terms of ownership. I argue for the relevance of a relational view of class not only on societal or global scale, but on the scale of individual enterprises as well.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation will explore the relationship between class, migration and social mobility, using the example of regional and transcontinental Somalian migrants. It will be shown that class matters not only for migration routes, but also for how people are able to settle in a new place.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will discuss the connection between class and migration, using the example of the Somalian refugees. While in Europe and North America Somalians are regarded as one of the least 'successful' group of migrants, often dependent on social security, in Kenya they are seen as almost too successful. I argue that these apparently contradictory images are not only due to a status paradox of migration (Nieswand 2011), but also to the neglect of aspects of class in much of the migration literature. Even though it was claimed time and again that class as a concept is not useful for African societies (Goody 1971, Neubert & Stoll 2018), I argue that class matters also when other categories, such as ethnicity and clan, are more prominent for identification processes. Class, in the sense of the socio-economic foundation of 'life chances', including the possibility for education and physical mobility, not only influences where people can migrate to, but also how they are able to settle in the new place. In the case of Somalian migration three different groups can be observed - people from poor families stay within the country or the region, not able to move beyond; migrants from middle class backgrounds often move abroad, but stay in an insecure position in the new place; only migrants from upper class families are able to move back to East Africa after having lived abroad, enabled by their financial resources and 'Western' citizenship. This presentation is based on fieldwork in Kenya and Germany.

Paper short abstract:

Exploring the intersections of state, corporate and grassroot labour politics through the experiences of people living in an industrial Russian town, I suggest revisiting the anthropological discussion on caste vs. class as a way to capture local specifics and common trends in global capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

My ethnography of a 140,000 strong industrial Russian city suggests that the time may have come to consider local social dynamics through a lens of caste - rather than class- formation and reproduction. The biggest influencers in the local dynamic of precarization, spatial segregation and class polarization, are the increasingly automated resource-mining companies that face simultaneously a surplus of underskilled workers and a lack of qualified labour. They react by individualizing contractual relations, but also by early pre-selection and training of future technical cadres. A guarded cottage suburb built by one of the plants for its elite employees, visibly divides the previously unified city into those who are gainfully - albeit precariously - employed, and whose employment, and future, remains in doubt. The social and residential politics of the state and municipal authorities further divide the city by separating the marginalized and fixing in place the potentially employable and biologically reproducible populations. Additionally, a slow-paced ecological disaster related to the long history of mining beneath the city itself, provides local powers with the rhetoric of emergency and cementing their dominance over grassroots opposition. To explore these processes in their mutual constitution, I will concentrate on three ethnographic sites: the companies' HR quarters and their labour politics; the schools where fears and aspirations of middle-class parents and their children can be observed; and the psychiatric clinic that monitors the process of (mal)adaptation on the part of the poor, the addicted and the mentally disturbed.

Paper short abstract:

Experiences of Colombia's decade-long violent conflict depend heavily on a person's class background. Through the example of Bogota's upper middle class, I show how their class-specific emotional habitus works to distance them from conflict-related events both spatially and emotionally.

Paper long abstract:

Colombia is the second-most unequal country in the Americas, according to its Gini-Index from 2017. But inequality expresses itself not only in terms of economic wealth distribution, but also in relation to people's experiences of the country's decade-long violent conflict. While some have the means to avoid its most gruesome expressions, such as massacres, displacement, disappearance, kidnappings and extortions, others are not so lucky.

Colombia's capital, Bogota, is divided into six estratos (strata), according to which utilities like water and electricity are charged. These estratos serve as geographical demarcations of social status and are commonly understood as class markers, while also being tightly linked to the perceived levels of security. Through ethnographic fieldwork gathered with individuals residing in the upper sections of the social strata, I had the chance to get to know the ways in which upper middle class Bogotans are affected by the country's conflict. Making use of the ambiguity of the word 'affected', I refer to both the material and emotional experiences of the conflict, and argue that there is a specifically upper middle class experience of the conflict based on an emotional habitus. This habitus enables them to distance themselves from conflict-related events both spatially and emotionally. The particular strategies developed to avoid being affected by the conflict can be read as strategies of 'doing class', as well, and reveal some of the emotional foundations of the specifically upper middle class experiences of the conflict.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores transnational class making under the framework of posted work, that is mobility of workers within transnational subcontracting chain. I ask how posted work affects individual class experiences and collective political agency of Polish workers in construction and shipyards.

Paper long abstract:

Transnational mobility of labour and capital has released class making from its national confines. Mobility becomes a class resource, while different forms of mobility resonate with the making of class in different ways (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). In this paper, I explore class making under the framework of posted work - one of the flagship and politically more controversial projects of European integration, which involves the transnational subcontracting of foreign labour for short-term projects under the provision of service. I ask how posted work mobility affects individual class experiences and collective political agency of Polish workers in construction and shipyard sector. I look at posted work as an intersection of a particular mobility and employment regime, within which workers enact their individual class projects (Ortner 2003). In particular, I point to the diversified outcomes of posted work mobility and the interplay between what posted work offers and how do workers use it as a class resource, both informally and in relation to organized trade union activism. I will point to a key relational distinction between Polish posted workers who identify themselves as kontraktowcy, that is those who commit themselves to transnational class making through contract work mobility, and those who are posted abroad by their regular employer and treat transnational mobility as an intermittent stage in their professional biographies. I built my argument on multi-sited fieldwork, including interviews and participant observation, conducted among Polish posted workers in Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Poland in 2014-2017.

Paper short abstract:

I study the negotiation of the value of miners' body, dead or alive, in Kazakhstani coal mines. For miners, precaritisation as a class process consists of unpredictability of death and the unpredictable value of the labouring (dead) body.

Paper long abstract:

This paper studies how class processes and relations are negotiated in wage/compensation and Occupational Health and Safety struggles in mining. Analysing the aftermath of a 2017 mining accident in an ArcelorMittal mine Kazakhstan that killed three miners, I show how class unfolds in discussions on death and value. Due to miners' particularly dangerous work class position, class as identity and practice is first negotiated in the struggles for life and death in Occupational Health and Safety. There, global standards, the Indian management and local Health and Safety officials form a battlefield of "Safety vs profit" where miners have to negotiate their physical and class positions every shift. The second crucial negotiation between workers and the management is about the value of the body of the miner: first in the negotiations of the value of the labouring body and secondly in the form of compensation for the dead body. I argue that in the case of miners, precaritisation as a class process signifies unpredictability of death and the unpredictable value of the labouring (dead) body.

Paper short abstract:

I explore links between different kinds of dispossessions in rural Estonia in relation to local environmental changes, contributing into the emergence of classes. This case allows developing the concepts of dispossession as well as linking it to both spatial and gender dimensions of class formation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the links between class and dispossession on the one hand and local environmental crises or perceptions thereof on the other. Based on research in rural Estonia, I will demonstrate how increase in logging in local forests impacts different groups in the region and reflects as well as contributes into the formation of classes. The social strata that have been in flux since 1990s in this post-transformational ex-Soviet country are still shifting. As new categorisations along the lines of access to economic, symbolic and cultural resources form, those dispossessed of such resources also face further and less discussed losses: social and environmental. The loss of social networks, a process that further bolsters class formation, challenges people's ability to contest adverse changes in the local environment such as logging. Whilst threats of logging or actual destruction of forests are widely lamented, specific local mobilisation for change can be dwarfed by dispossession, in particular social dispossession, and foster further dispossessions.

As such, class formation can be theorised as a phenomenon that is relational both across social groups as well as across categories of dispossession. Since social and environmental dispossession are unfolding in specific settings (villages, forests) reducing - or increasing - connection to this space, the spatial dimension is inevitably important. Further attention is paid to the gender dimension as the way the determination and endurance of the local men and women in overcoming losses, and their contributions to the society, are differently challenged and changed.

Paper short abstract:

Taking the case of paid domestic work in cities like New Delhi, this paper attempts to look at how the neoliberal upper middle class, while 'reinventing' their own structure in the capitalist backdrop, modify, restructure and yet also simultaneously reaffirm class hierarchies and inequalities.

Paper long abstract:

In developing nations like India, rural to urban labour migration is an important area of concern as it is extensively reflective of the ways in which changes in the urbane, class-specific demand reproduce and restructure social disparities and networks of marginalization. This paper attempts to explore the field of the unorganized labour sector in urban India, through the case of the live-in migrant domestic workers in metropolitan cities like New Delhi, India. Through the peculiar case of paid domestic work that makes for a large chunk of unorganized labour, while also simultaneously displaying an over-representation of women, the aim is to understand how this field is fundamentally 'new' in its organization because it marks a moment of crucial transformation of the older hierarchies built on inter-regional class and ethnic relations. The idea of the live-in domestic worker is further intriguing as this is a form of labour that exists in the space of an upper middle class family, thus connecting the labour market intimately to the changing realities of this class-specific, familial space. The ideas- firstly of the kind of labour within the limits of a home and secondly of the upper middle class urban household as the consumer for services of paid domestic work, make the upper middle class neoliberal family an arena for the reproduction of an emerging structure of control where the class based representations of power are mirrored in the conspicuous roles assigned to the employer family, the agents and the live-in domestic worker.