Paper short abstract:

Marathi-speaking domestic workers from Dalit caste groups in Mumbai use nativist vocabularies to fashion themselves as more trust-worthy and local than migrant workers. By securing long-term domestic work, they and their families seek to reproduce themselves as the city's respectable working-class.

Paper long abstract:

The labour market for domestic work in Mumbai is highly competitive, with old - new, young - old, local - migrant women, contending for the same jobs. Marathi workers, speaking the regional language, re-purpose nativist vocabularies and fashion themselves as more trust-worthy than migrant workers who come to Mumbai from other regions in India.

Studies of nativist politics in Mumbai have been limited to the Shiv Sena, the political party with a sons-of-the-soil agenda for Marathi-speakers. The everyday claims of 'being Marathi' in Mumbai, outside of the realm of political parties, reveals the internal faultlines within the category. I show how workers from Dalit and other disadvantaged caste groups deploy broad nativist differentiations to establish affinity to being 'kamgaar', to being members of the Marathi working-class. These claims are notwithstanding the fact that the kamgaar movement, constituting the organised textile and dock workers of the 20th century largely excluded Dalit and women workers. I draw from Veena Das's conceptualisation of engagements with temporality as active work that are not limited to the realm of performance or nostalgia, and argue that workers re-work their past, to get ahead in the labour market in the present. This occurs at multiple sites - in the home where the family is sought to re-fashion as a conscientious working-class family, and where daughters are inducted into domestic work. In the union protests, where the colloquial term 'bai' ('woman' in Marathi) is sought to be replaced by the Marathi term for wage domestic workers, 'gharelu kamgaar'.

Paper short abstract:

I explore the role of wage labour and describe the socio-economic effects that it has had on the garment workers in Bangladesh. I highlight the values in the life-world of the garment workers to demonstrate the emerging socialities in neoliberal Bangladesh - i.e., among the industrial workers.

Paper long abstract:

We tend to think of factory life as limited to the inside of the factory, its work hours, and its discipline, but I have found that factory life in Dhaka, Bangladesh encompassed all aspects of life for the garment workers amongst whom I lived. In this paper, I explore the role of wage labour and highlight the socio-economic effects that it has had on the garment industry workers in Bangladesh. I demonstrate how life outside the factories, to a large degree, revolved around the same values and concerns that preoccupied workers when they were at work. I claim that the ideological world had no outside, and that all the ruptures or changes in it continuously created new social orders with open-ended possibilities to which the workers were connected. This shall be seen reflected in the economic autonomy and freedom of the workers. The workers navigated between the established social orders and created possibilities of freedom, i.e. a break from the dominant relationships. I illustrate my arguments by explaining garment workers' understanding of their work, income, relationships within families, and use of consumer goods, and reveal situations where the social encompasses ideologically contradictory events in forming a temporal totality. This indicates reconfiguration of the social order, evinced by the ever emergent category of the 'worthy woman'. I think analysis of these events and processes will shed light into the ongoing creation and transformation of the social in its totalisation process.

Paper short abstract:

Harris Tweed is exported worldwide, but it can only be hand-woven at the homes of Outer Hebridean islanders. Considering the intertwinement of production and reproduction, I discuss how the lens of social reproduction reframes self-employed weavers' social lives and experiences of work time.

Paper long abstract:

Trademark-protected since 1910, Harris Tweed can only be hand-woven at islanders' homes in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Despite this localized production, the famous woollen cloth is exported to over 50 countries, contributing in important ways to local livelihoods in a region threatened by depopulation and described as economically fragile. The industry's unique production model, involving not only mill-workers but also hundreds of self-employed weavers who work from home, has long played an important part in population retention in rural areas, where other employment opportunities are scarce.

The domestic and flexible nature of employment in Harris Tweed weaving, along with its intertwinement with other livelihood strategies and social engagements, have long shaped local experiences of work and life. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the work, workers and workplaces variously involved in the making of Harris Tweed, this paper considers how weavers navigate the challenges and possibilities of self-employment in this industry - which has long been vulnerable to shifts in global markets.

Examining the experiences of home-based self-employed weavers through the lens of social reproduction, I explore how a 'unitary' framework that considers the intertwinement between production and reproduction can illuminate the emergence of different kinds of 'work', and particular experiences and understandings of the value of 'work time'. Locating these experiences of self-employment within local political-economic histories and fluctuating global markets, I discuss how ethnographic research and social reproduction theory can generate more nuanced accounts of the complex social relations involved in contemporary capitalist forms.

Paper short abstract:

Based on 20 months of fieldwork in Kenya, this paper explores two cases where work is not the acquisition of cash but an investment in social relationships. It discusses the hierarchical chains of dependence that prop-up incomes in wage-less contexts and the affective labour of friendship.

Paper long abstract:

'As a man, you must get up early in the morning and do something to get money'.

Such is the discursive moralisation of the predicament in which most Kenyans find themselves. Devoid of any state support, without permanent employment or security of income, cash-hunting in the informal economy is practically the norm. In a part of the world that barely experienced the 'Fordist' manufacturing boom and the expansion of employment it brought, economic life is lived primarily through precarious social relationships, the means and ends of social reproduction. Becoming parents and establishing middle-class households is a common aspiration, often pursued in the absence of economic security. Kenyans turn to each other, not least well-off 'sponsors' and 'sustainers' in their families and neighbourhoods, for financial support.

This paper turns our attention towards 'relation-making' as one of Kenyans' 'artful strategies in addressing the challenges and uncertainties of capitalism'. Drawing on over 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork spent in peri-urban central Kenya, it explores two parallel cases (one involving adult women, another urban youth) where 'work' is not so much the acquisition of cash, but an investment in social relationships. It speaks to the hierarchical chains of dependence that prop up incomes in wage-less contexts, and the 'affective labour' of friendship, tried and tested as it often is. It ends by asking if citizenship in both Southern and Northern contexts might not be better be thought of under the rubric of hunting, soliciting and claiming rather than 'care' or 'dependence' outright.

Paper short abstract:

Looking at Kazakhstani industrial workers and digital nomads in Thailand, I ask where the boundaries production and reproduction run in late capitalism and which groups in society have the power to determine where the boundaries are situated in their own lives.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the future and the past of work by studying reproducing life and reproducing work as two complementary and antagonistic aspects. Kathi Weeks (2011) suggests that how we think about work should move from the Marxist perspective of producing value to its feminist critique of the common reproducing of life, reproduction as social production. She proposes 'life' as a possible counterpoint to work, in the sense of a full life, filled with qualities that we are urged towards. While keeping the postwork utopias in mind, I want to complicate things through thinking about the reproduction of work and of life through two case studies. Firstly, the female Kazakhstani factory workers who bring their reproductive labour their workplace to keep the crumbling factory going and secondly location-independent IT-workers, digital nomads, who escape the traditional location based work arrangements and choose 'life' (at least in discourse) and travel with children. This paper asks where the boundaries of work and life, production and reproduction run in late capitalism and which groups in society have the structural position or power to determine where these boundaries of 'having work' or 'getting a life' are situated. The data for this paper is gathered through an extensive field work with Kazakhstani mining communities and a fresh pilot study of digital nomad families in Koh Phangan, Thailand.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the complex and contradictory nature of securing livelihoods and pursuing dignified work through a solidarity economy project in Mexico. I present a challenge to the normative conceptual dichotomy of capitalism and its other which has relevance beyond the regional context.

Paper long abstract:

The solidarity economy has been championed by activists, academics and policy makers as a new paradigm of economic behaviour, which describes alternative routes to securing livelihoods and wellbeing than those which prevail in capitalist economies. This paper explores the solidarity economy paradigm through findings from 18 months' fieldwork with members of a network called the Mercado Alternativo Túmin (MAT) in Mexico. In particular, I explore the case of Don Mateo - an elderly man who engages with the MAT both as a survival strategy and in his pursuit for meaningful and dignified work.

Combining life history and participant observation, I show how it is possible to understand and engage in a solidarity economy yet at the same time reproduce aspirations, actions and social relations more commonly identified with the capitalist economy. First, I suggest the MAT was a vehicle through which Don Mateo secured a livelihood and dignified work in otherwise abject socio-economic circumstances. This involved a process of creative self-reinvention, based on his past experience of "good working times." I then show how Don Mateo's position within the project led to the creation of credit and debt relations, paradoxically undermining the very solidarity network his job was meant to sustain.

This paper reveals the complex and contradictory nature of securing livelihoods and pursuing dignified work within and against contemporary capitalism in rural Mexico. The ethnography presents a challenge to the normative conceptual dichotomy of capitalism and its other in ways which have relevance beyond regional specificity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper evaluates the analytical advantages of approaching volunteering as a form of work, rather than a dimension of citizenship. Drawing on radical feminist insights, I consider the relationship between volunteering and other waged and unwaged forms of work in the UK.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1970s, radical feminists in Europe and North America campaigned for 'wages for housework'. Their strategy was not only to make family care and domestic chores visible and remunerable as work, but also to show how this unwaged work was structurally related to other forms of commodified labour. They broadened the concept of work, arguing that socially reproductive activities of socializing humans into employment, and sustaining them outside of it were not in fact external to production within Fordist capitalism, but integral to it. This paper examines the relevance of these feminist analyses for a different form of unwaged activity in the contemporary era - volunteering.

Within anthropology, volunteering is mostly analysed through concepts of citizenship, morality, humanitarianism or public participation. Yet this kind of approach does not sufficiently illuminate the relationship of volunteering to contemporary capitalist production. I argue that by analysing volunteering as work, it becomes possible to evaluate how it is mobilised, coordinated and disciplined in ways that are closely related to other forms of waged and unwaged forms of work in the wider economy. This contention is explored through ethnographic research of the increasingly prominent place of Human Resource Management within UK volunteering, which seeks mould volunteer activities and attitudes in accordance with priorities of productivity, efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Paper short abstract:

By applying discourses of care work to alternative agricultural practices our research explores how organic smallholders in Austria expand their concepts of work to inlcude relationships of care with more-than-human actors, recognising their contributions to creating value and making a livelihood.

Paper long abstract:

We would like to present the results of a two-year research project investigating full-time farmers in Austria who - apparently opting for a precarious lifestyle - down-size their farms or remain deliberately small-scale, practise non-conventional agriculture far beyond organic standards, and distribute largely unprocessed staple foods along local consumer networks. In this transdisciplinary research (Cultural Anthropology, European Ethnology, History, and Applied Agricultural Science) we move beyond the persistent dichotomy of "capitalist agriculture" vs. a "romantic rurality" of hobby farmers in industrialised societies. Based on biographic interviews with farming families of four smallholdings, our findings demonstrate that these highly trained agriculturalists are keenly aware of the necessity to make a living. Yet, they refuse to do so through exploitation - of soil life, farm animals, the environment, and human labour, including their own. Applying and extending feminist theories of care work to such agricultural practices that go beyond the nature/culture divide (Haraway, Puig de la Bellacasa) allows us to explore farmers' concepts and practices of work as co-production with more-than-human actors. Mutual relationships of care are essential to "good" agriculture for these farmers, yet often it is "thankless labour". The value of their work is frequently disputed, by state bureaucracy as well as consumers who ignore, even penalize practices of care-work. Through direct encounters with consumers - by engaging in community supported agriculture schemes, food coops, and farmers' markets for example - the farmers hope to claim recognition for their work, in economic as well as social terms.

Paper short abstract:

Asbestos production in Casale Monferrato provided stable jobs but destroyed the town's future through the pollution of the environment. A notion of labour as the encompassing reproduction of life allows to examine the social struggles about asbestos production as struggles over a sustainable future.

Paper long abstract:

For decades, Europe's biggest asbestos processing factory was the main employer of Casale Monferrato, a small industrial town in Northern Italy. At the same time, it systematically destroyed the town's future through the massive pollution of the environment and the health hazards of the asbestos fibre; not only for the workers, but for the entire urban population. In this town, industrial labour provided the indispensable means for the reproduction of the present and near future of the workers and their families. The ongoing industrial disaster simultaneously undermined the livelihoods for the long-term future and future generations.

Developing an extended concept of labour as the encompassing reproduction of life, this contribution takes the different and contradicting social struggles around asbestos production in Casale Monferrato as a starting point to examine the emerging conflicts about the creation of a sustainable future. In these struggles, certain social actors emphasised the importance of job security for the families depending on asbestos workers' wages. They focused on the protection of jobs and the continued existence of the factory including certain claims for improved safety at work measures. Others fought against asbestos production as such, striving for a complete ban of this hazardous industry in order to reclaim a sustainable long-term future for the community.

Reading the two incommensurable positions through the lens of labour as the encompassing reproduction of life shows how notions of 'the good life' shape the imaginations of and the struggles for a future of this town, devastated by this industrial disaster.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from a one-year long fieldwork research, this paper analyses how supermarket employees in post-socialist Bosnia, who are constantly torn between staying and leaving the country for a better life, cope with precariousness in everyday life in a post-industrial and post-socialist town.

Paper long abstract:

In the north-eastern Bosnian town of Tuzla, "Bingo", a local supermarket chain, has replaced the former strong industry. Amidst the economic stagnation, this company represents the major employer in the town, while it maintains the employees in precarious situations through short term contracts, low wages, or the ban of unions. For many of my interlocutors, the main goal after the war was to obtain stable employment regardless of the working conditions. However, the opening of the German labour market for non-EU citizens has led to a change of consciousness among the employees. For many of them, migrating seems to be the only possibility to build a stable and rahat (carefree) life, while staying signifies various forms of hardship. While supermarket employees started to create "plan B's" to prepare to leave Bosnia by learning the German language or going to nursery classes, they are also trying to stay by developing strategies of dealing with everyday precariousness in a constellation Wendy Brown (2017) calls "sacrifial citizenship".

This shared predicament leads to the creation of strong solidarity bonds among employees in form of mutual assistance and exchange of knowledge, which often crosse hierarchical structures and the boundaries of the work space. In this paper, I will analyse the everyday practices of "those who stay" in order to deal with what for them is a double precariousness: working as a supermarket employee and living on the margins of Europe. I will also show that neoliberal transformations have not erased forms of solidarity which existed during Yugoslavia, but rather strengthened them further.

Paper short abstract:

The daily paid and unpaid work of mothers who hope their daughters can reach better educational and labour futures in Chile obliges us to rethink the relationship between reproductive labour, social reproduction and the possibility for class and gender transformation.

Paper long abstract:

While school-aged working-class youth in a former industrial city in Chile navigate between educational aspirations and a changing labour market in their search for social mobility, mothers use their care work and housework to ensure that their children, especially daughters, avoid domestic responsibilities and continue their studies. In turn, young women are aware of the self-sacrifice of their mothers and hope that with better educational and labour futures they might become economically independent from men and help their mothers to 'move forward' from poverty and machista relationships. Ethnographic attention to how mothers and daughter's desires exceed what would be simply reproduced in terms of class and gender illustrate how reproductive labour is crucial not only for the social reproduction of capitalist society but could also have disruptive potential, even if in uncertain ways. Perhaps paradoxically, the anticipative daily paid and unpaid work of mothers reminds us of how the work of social reproduction - to make a living, and a life worth living - far from being exclusively framed around an ongoing 'maintenance' of a set of social relationships, might also contain the seed for its own transformation.

Paper short abstract:

With its focus on 'women's businesses' in Russia, the paper identifies the specific class and gender dimension of such ventures, heavily dependent on male's capitals, and explores their link with social reproduction

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on a specific type of self-employment in Russia by exploring businesses set up by women's spouses who provide startup capital and other forms of assistance to their wives. Such enterprises are primarily nested in particular 'gender-appropriate' fields of the service economy, e.g. beauty industry, fitness, apparels. Along with their dependency on male's capitals, female businesses are commonly portrayed as rarely performing well. They are perceived in terms of gift-giving (as a husband's present) which discourages ex-husbands to lay claim on them in the event of divorce.

This type of gendered economy, embedded in family and household structures, provides a vantage point for studying the shifting meanings of work and labor in post-Soviet Russia. Among the groups of the Russian elite, female businesses primarily function as 'business for pleasure' enabling the Russian newly rich women to negotiate their class position and assert the status of oligarch's wife (Ratilainen 2012). Yet among the small-scale entrepreneurs in the Russian province, whom I address in the paper, class considerations are less important while those of social reproduction come to the fore. I argue that the male entrepreneurs or successful managers grant capitals to their wives as to provide them with an alternative form of employment and alleviate the burden of combining child-rearing and waged work. Thus, I show that the emergence of women's businesses corresponds to precarious conditions of employment in Russia and insecurities about social reproduction rather than reflects a proliferation of neoliberal ideals and subjectivities (cf Yurchak 2002).

Paper short abstract:

This paper departs from a critical appraisal of the relation between the state, the voluntary sector and the household, and invites a return to the anthropology of gender to better apprehend why labour of care is still perceived as confined to the private yet it is crucial to sustaining the public.

Paper long abstract:

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a self-organised medical facility on the outskirts of Athens, this paper sets off to explore how women's unwaged labour of care has gone largely unrecognised, yet has proved crucial to both the functioning of the facility they volunteered in, the livelihood of many citizens who attended the facility in search for care and, ultimately, to the neoliberal statecraft project in the wake of austerity measures. Responding to the question of whether the economic crisis can entail a markedly gendered aspect, I will show how the Greek volunteering women I worked with engaged with the aftermath of the economic crisis and resorted to their skills of housewives and carers to keep the medical facility working efficiently. I suggest that they did so by tapping into gendered expectations and domestic modes of care which, extracted from the household, were progressively relocated in the voluntary sector. Crucially, to the voluntary sector the state had been increasingly outsourcing the provision of those welfare services it was no longer able to provide.

This paper departs from a critical appraisal of the relation between the state, the voluntary sector and the household, and invites a return to the anthropology of gender to better apprehend why labour of care is still perceived as confined to 'the private' and 'the domestic' yet it is crucial to sustaining 'the public' and 'the state.'

Paper short abstract:

This paper provides ethnographic descriptions of Chilean working-class women's practices of social reproduction - or the labour oriented to the maintenance and reproduction of people's lives - and the values they attach to them.

Paper long abstract:

In classic sociological approaches to class, the position occupied in the productive structure is at the centre of the classification process. This has resulted in awkward categories ascribed to those who are aside of the formal productive structure as well as either the denial to theorize the unwaged labour that assures people's livelihoods in class terms or the difficulties to place such a work in a wider framework of class formation (as in the case of means of livelihoods school). Instead, Marxist feminist and anthropologist alike have highlighted the co-constitution of production and social reproduction (Eldhom, Harris & Young, 1978), the class struggles over social reproduction (Arruzza, Bhattacharya & Fraser 2019) as well as the centrality of narratives of worth and the diversity of activities aimed at assuring people's livelihoods in thinking about class (Kalb, 2015; Narotzky & Goddard, 2015; Donner, 2015).

Echoing these researches, this paper provides ethnographic descriptions of Chilean working-class women's practices of social reproduction - or the labour oriented to the maintenance and reproduction of people's lives - and the values they attach to them. They are revealed in the light of the gendered organisation of the system of production/reproduction in pre-neoliberal Chile, context in which the mature and elderly women who are the main characters of this paper grew up and were encouraged to become housewives. It is argued that through reproductive labour, women occupy classed and gendered positions whilst embodying, rejecting and/or subverting external negative moral judgments they are often subject to.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the economies of work that have emerged amongst Hungarian Roma refugees in Canada. I examine how seeking asylum can be understood as a social reproduction strategy for Roma responding to the class relations, gendered dynamics, and citizenship regimes of contemporary capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the economies of work that have emerged amongst Hungarian Roma seeking asylum in Canada. The paper is based on my ethnographic engagement with Roma who leave Hungary for Canada, a movement that has unfolded this past decade in response to the region's postsocialist deindustrialization and rise in far-right politics. I examine the life-sustaining economic strategies of Romani families in Toronto, as they navigate the class relations and citizenship regimes of contemporary capitalism. I explore how these strategies are embedded in gendered divisions of work in which the families' social reproduction - particularly the work of refugee claims - is coordinated by resourceful maternal figures. In capturing ethnographically and analyzing theoretically the "work beyond workplaces" of Hungarian Romani refugee families in Canada, I propose that the life decision to seek asylum can itself be understood as a resourceful strategy for Roma maneuvering the changing conditions wrought by capitalist processes. Ultimately in considering the implications of the economic strategies of Romani refugees for our analyses of work and capitalism, I argue that an expansion of the concept of labour invites a rethinking of the dichotomy between 'economic migrants' and 'political refugees.' The paper thus moves forward anthropological discussions on the relation between new forms of labour, the gendered dimensions of social reproduction, and the citizenship regimes that emerge under contemporary conditions of global capitalism, emphasizing the need for an anthropology of work that pays attention to the dynamics of citizenship and migration within everyday strategies of social reproduction.