Short Abstract:

This roundtable explores transitional aspects of labor in the wake of multiple ecosocial crises. What power geometries matter for livelihoods and imaginaries for a better life? Which human/non-human relations are created, transformed, and disposed in contemporary processes of systemic reproduction?

Long Abstract:

Is the world of labor in transition? Is the work and care needed to reproduce life changing? What power geometries matter for livelihoods and imaginaries for a better life? Which human/non-human relations are created, transformed, and disposed in contemporary processes of systemic reproduction? Can we understand labor as an instrument of capital without addressing its intimate connection with care and nature’s capacities?

Exploitation, extraction, dispossession have been used at different moments to address these matters. This roundtable explores whether newer theoretical tools help capture transitional aspects of labor in the wake of multiple ecosocial crises. Concepts such as ‘plantationocene’ point to links between colonial power and racialization in the emergence and consolidation of capitalism. Renewed emphasis on social reproduction as a complex, scalar process helps us address the dynamics of contemporary labor.

Participants conceptualize labor broadly, encompassing paid work and the many livelihood activities involved in social reproduction. The papers place individual case studies within larger matrices of power and examine the power-laden processes that categorize, differentiate, or unify those laborers, as well as the nature and spaces they continuously engage. They explore a range of livelihood activities and resources to ask: Whose labor (what resource) is recognized (and valued) and whose (which) is made illegible? How are lines of differentiation challenged? Are livelihood practices under study “outside” of capitalist relations or are circuits of capitalist value obscured? What demands are working people making on the state, capital, and nature? What solidarities and divisions are the creating in the process?