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- Convenors:
-
Matteo Saltalippi
Fabrizio Loce-Mandes (Università degli Studi di Perugia)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building (LAN), 0G/049
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the transformative potential of the pandemic in shaping new forms of workers' struggle regarding work and health rights, and how these raise new questions around labour activism as well as global and public health, and constitute new avenues for future anthropological research.
Long Abstract:
The pandemic has reshaped current work arrangements, allowed for new dimensions where work can emerge, and posed new questions around Global and Public health (Vineis 2020; Koplan et al. 2009). At the same time, the pandemic has engaged workers in new forms of struggle to defend their job and/or demand safe working conditions, triggering new elaborations of right to work and right to health, and posing new questions around labour organisation, health, class identity and activism (Ovetz 2020).
This panel calls for new studies which can reveal a close relationship between work, health and socio-economic inequalities and update the existing corpus of work (Israel et al. 1998; Singer 2016) with a specific focus on the transformative potential of the pandemic to identify future outlooks.
We welcome papers concerning social and structural transformations that emerged or were highlighted during the pandemic, and focus on the interwovenness of work and health rights, as well as the continuing relevance of labour conflict. Papers should engage with the intersection between political, economic, social, and cultural processes which define work and health, as well as exposing the critical encounters between these spheres - from large and international scale, to small and local contexts. Papers can take historical perspectives, and can be based entirely or partially on fieldwork during the pandemic; they can rely on mainstream as well as visual and multimodal approaches.
This knowledge production will help us identify the transformation that occurred since the pandemic, and reveal new avenues for anthropological research.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Andrea Filippo Ravenda (University of Torino) Giulia Arrighetti (University of Turin)
Paper short abstract:
Starting from two ethnographic researches conducted in southern Italy (in an oil refinery) and in central Italy (Amazon warehouses in Lazio) the paper will explore the relationship between occupational risk factors and occupational medicine as a control dispositive at the time of the COVID-19
Paper long abstract:
The relationship between work and health is one of the central issues of the biopolitics of capitalism: on the one hand, occupational risk factors, on the other hand, occupational medicine as a control dispositive.
This complex relationship seems to change from the industry's traditional productive "forms" to the "new" frontiers of the dematerialized capitalism of platforms, especially following the current pandemic phase of COVID-19.
For example, in 2020, Amazon never stopped its production but rather invested more than 140 million euros in Italy to build new distribution centres, favouring territories crossed by employment and environmental crisis. During the first lockdown, some workers complained that the company was not providing appropriate personal protection equipment and hence resorted to absenteeism as a form of resistance to face the fear of being infected in the workplace. The company responded to the health crisis and to resistance practices put in place by workers, pushing surveillance further into workers' bodies through technological devices.
Therefore, this paper aims to analyze how the relationship between health and work has changed concerning the syndemic phase and the transformations in the production systems of contemporary capitalism. Starting from two ethnographic researches led in southern Italy (in an oil refinery) and in central Italy (in an amazon hub), the paper will explore and compare the two different workers' experiences (from the "classic" energy industry to the contemporary forms of "amazon capitalism") in the double bind between health precautions and production needs
Hestia-Ioana Delibas (Universidade de Coimbra)
Paper short abstract:
Using as a case study the conflict over restricted access to farmers' markets in Romania, this paper addresses the impact the Covid 19 pandemic had on the peasantry in post-socialist space. We will underly issues regarding recognition in the fight for justice and state positionality in relation to this conflict.
Paper long abstract:
The Covid 19 pandemic has proven to be an unprecedented crisis that has exposed both the limits of the public systems and many social injustices which are frequently invisibilized. Moreover, the pandemic has also accentuated the discrepancies between classes, placing peasants and rural workers in vulnerable positions, accentuated by a minimization of the role of the state, which has positioned itself as an actor due only to managing the economic sector, without taking enough social protection measures. This is even more true for the peripheral countries of post-socialist Europe, for which neoliberalism has guided policymaking throughout the transition period.
This paper addresses the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on peasants’ conditions in the post-socialist space taking as a case study the conflict ignited as the farmers’ markets in Romania were closed, as part of security measures taken by the Romanian Government for pandemic control. It will look at how this conflict was framed by different instances, from state officials, media outlets and peasant activists, focusing on the issue of recognition in the struggle for justice. The Covid-19 pandemic has only accentuated the already existing precarious conditions of the peasantry, which is already highly impacted by land dispossession and the rise of agri-business. As part of the European periphery, Romania, a country with a large population living in rural areas, has been subject to land grabbing and neoliberal reforms which translated into the destabilisation of a rural population already impoverished, that has very few strategies left for survival.
Chiara Quagliariello (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) Giulia Zanini (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
Paper short abstract:
The paper shows how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the provision of reproductive healthcare in Italy. It explores how a highly medicalized and gendered heteronormative approach to reproduction has produced an implementation of practices that may seem paradoxical from a public health perspective.
Paper long abstract:
When Covid-19 hit Europe, Italy was the first country to introduce measures that would significantly restrict people’s mobility and transform their daily life, including working arrangements and healthcare. This paper focuses on how adjustments to the pandemic have affected the provision of women and pregnant people’s reproductive healthcare in Italy between February and May 2020. We illustrate how a national structural approach to maternal and reproductive health was adapted to the pandemic, favouring highly medicalized care, sometimes delaying essential care and leaving women and pregnant people feeling lonely and uncomfortable. Drawing on data collected among women and health professionals, and on policies, press releases, petitions, reports and online material produced by activist groups and professional bodies, we analyse what measures were introduced during the first wave of the epidemic in four areas of women’s reproductive health: antenatal, childbirth and postnatal care, assisted reproduction, and abortion. This analysis explores how a pre-existing reproductive healthcare system has produced, during the crisis, an implementation of reproductive care practices that may seem paradoxical from a public health point of view, but are compliant with a gendered heteronormative approach to reproduction that values motherhood more than any other reproductive path, which associates extended risks to women’s reproductive health, and which especially promotes reproduction only for certain people.
Livia Garofalo (Data Society Research Institute)
Paper short abstract:
This paper ethnographically reflects on what it means to do “essential work” when workers are considered at once essential and dispensable. The pandemic has shed light on the importance of occupational health, while exacerbating inequalities and worker exploitation.
Paper long abstract:
Frontline workers have been praised as heroic during the pandemic, while having to report to work under less than ideal conditions. High rates of infection, different employment and national policies, and continuous emergence COVID-19 variants have increased the vulnerability of these workers to the virus, surveillance, and socio-economic precarity. COVID mitigation measures like temperature checks, contact tracing, and vaccination coexist have been implemented in workplaces with other forms of monitoring of productivity with worker retaliation. Drawing from interviews with essential workers in meatpacking, warehouses, grocery stores, and manufacturing in the United States and medical workers in Argentina and Italy, I show how the pandemic has made evident how forms of worker control are often not accompanied by actual health monitoring and COVID surveillance. I argue that different forms of frontline work have their own contextual specificity, while sharing a common feature, essential dispensability, that can be the basis for collective organizing. The conditions of pandemic labor have therefore indeed created opportunities for new and creative forms of worker solidarity, while at the same time reiterating the need for basic worker protections like paid sick leave, hazard pay, and contractual stability.
Fabrizio Loce-Mandes (Università degli Studi di Perugia)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the critical issue connected to Public health service on gambling disorder and early interception of players. Through an ethnography of health care practice in Umbria (Italy) the paper analyses the criticalities of working dimensions and the right to health during the pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
The pandemic and global financial crisis has produced change in the social welfare field, compromising public-health policies and community welfare. The public health service dedicated to addictions (from substances or gambling) has had to face new challenges, due to the work reorganisation of the structures and the practices related to the reception of users. My work is based on an ethnography of health care practices and the processes of construction of the gambling disorder; emerges a temporal suspension of two years, both in welfare treatment and in addictions, a «freezing of addiction», in which there was an alienation from society and from "substances" also caused from the closure of game rooms. The health services have attempted an online therapeutic approach which has brought out the difficulties in accessing IT tools.
There is a political/conflictual connection between economic, labour and right to health, a close relationship emerges between health and the socio-economic inequalities that the disorder of gambling brings out. In this fieldwork, health institutions define and differentiate players with GD, necessary for the construction of a diagnosis and therapeutic path. It becomes useful to explore not only the action of the local health services, to address the phenomenon and the "early interception of problematic players", but above all the game spaces, understood as "practiced places" and "relational spaces".
In this framework, I'll discuss theoretically and ethnographically the criticalities that are emerging on the relationship between political economies of welfare, social-health assistance and planning of Public health services.