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- Convenors:
-
Reana Senjković Svrčić
(Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research)
Ivan Đorđević
Rudi Klanjšek (University of Maribor)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Friday 26 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel will examine how the insecurity, fragmentation and fragility of working and living conditions manifests itself at the local, regional and national level, among specific professions, in the functioning of communities or vulnerable social groups, and in the biographies of individuals.
Long Abstract:
This panel will reconsider, update and broaden the IXth ICAES call (1973) for insights on the issues at the intersection of anthropology and mental wellbeing by setting the focus on how the insecurity, fragmentation and fragility of working and living conditions manifests itself at the local, regional and national level, among specific professions, in the functioning of communities or vulnerable social groups, and in the biographies of individuals. Due to the multiple emergencies and apparent threats of growing precarisation and casualisation of labor (inter alia) and the obvious need to reconceptualize the field of care in general, we seek to gain insights in what individuals perceive as the life stressors, how they cope with them and how they envisage the future of labor or cultures supportive of physical and mental wellbeing. The primary interest of this panel is in ethnographic and strongly contextualized research on contemporary experiences relating to the topic. However, we welcome other methodological interventions, including purely theoretical perspectives, that seek to answer questions relating to one or more of the following issues:
- everyday life of precarious workers;
- searching for a “prestigious job”;
- complexities of youth precarity;
- class and gender in precarious times;
- self-making in precarious times;
- affective work and social reproduction in precarious times;
- fieldwork in precarious times: ethics and politics;
- what kind of future of work do we want/imagine?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 26 July, 2024, -Riccardo Montanari (University of Milan-Bicocca)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will examine the psychosocial effects - such as experiences of discouragement, anxiety, and insomnia - produced by the precariousness of the Italian construction sector among workers and small entrepreneurs, and how they cope with these issues.
Paper long abstract:
This paper intends to reflect on the psychosocial effects produced by the precariousness of the construction sector among workers and small entrepreneurs in the Italian provinces of VCO (Piedmont) and Macerata (Marche). Like other contexts (Turner & Lingard, 2020), a commonality of behavioural patterns emerges to face the vulnerability and social insecurity of these workers. Trying to reflect on these habitus, the starting point adopted consists in the analysis of the restlessness generated by the capitalist reproduction of guilt and debt. Indeed, even though the institutions are aware of the physical damages provoked by this typology of work, the entrepreneurs’ vulnerability (Sischarenco, 2019) and experiences of anxiety, discouragement, and insomnia triggered by the socioeconomic pressures pass unnoticed. As for the “nervios” observed in Costa Rica by Low (1988), these aspects show how the nervous system is an embedded metaphor for the 'socio-political system' (Taussig, 1992). Furthermore, these manifestations of restlessness are faced by small entrepreneurs and workers through the use – and abuse – of alcohol, due to its ability to instil courage and anaesthetise the preoccupations caused by the structural violence of the banking and bureaucratic procedures (Graeber, 2011). Despite their awareness of the harmful effects on their health, the construction workers hardly modify their behaviour and even if they do it, these changes do not last long because of the stress produced by recurring bureaucratic or banking problems: drinking is seen as a medium of immediate enjoyment, fundamental for the physical and mental well-being.
Daniela Guerreiro (ISCSP- University of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
This article seeks to reflect on the working conditions of employees of Portuguese ethical fashion industry, their everyday life work in the studio and factories and the strategies they develop to resist to physical and psychological pressure and fight for more dignified conditions.
Paper long abstract:
The fall of Rana Plaza revealed the harsh conditions to which workers in the fashion industry are subjected (Horton, 2018). This industry, seeking to increase profits and reduce costs, produces mainly in countries in the global South, as these, due to economic, legal, and social factors, are more susceptible to labor exploitation (Nathan, Bhattacharjee, Rahul, et al., 2022).
However, it has been observed that in the global North these workers are also subject to precarious working conditions (Pereira, 2023). Among the youngest layers, a new type of worker is emerging, more flexible, always willing, which through the lens of compensation legitimizes and ignores the new forms of precariousness to which they are subject, and which inhibit them from satisfying their basic needs and having a decent standard of living (Peuter, 2014; Cecco, 2021).
This article is the result of my fieldwork in the atelier of 2 ethical fashion brands and interviews carried out with factory and unionized workers. It seeks to reflect on the working conditions of these women, their everyday life work in the studio and factories and the strategies they develop to resist to physical and psychological pressure and fight for more dignified conditions.
It is concluded that although ethical fashion brands are against labor exploitation, they are often oblivious to the real situation within the factories and have no power over what their production partners practice as fair wages or decent working conditions.
Gal Kramarski (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores Palestinian development workers' everyday encounters with the Israeli occupation, and the daily negotiation of terms at work. What constructs the meaning of a 'normal' routine for these development workers, and how do they cope with fears that arise in such an extreme reality?
Paper long abstract:
Over the past decades, Israel has created a rather specific everyday for Palestinians; an everyday that folds in itself different practices of overt and/or concealed violence. How does the fusion of violence into everyday life shape one’s experiences at work? This paper explores ethnographically the daily routine of young Palestinian professionals, hired by Jerusalem's municipality for implementing a large-scale Israeli development policy for East Jerusalem. As Palestinians who work for the Israeli state, these local practitioners are uniquely, sometimes uncomfortably, positioned between the state and their own Palestinian communities; this particular positionality creates a rather precarious worker.
How does one's daily route from home to work, and back look like? What sorts of emotional reactions arise when working in a community centre that is located inside a military basecamp, at Qalandia checkpoint? With reference to the militarised aesthetics of the space in which my interlocutors operate, I ask, how should we analyse the verbal and beyond-spoken references to such routine as 'normal'? What do Palestinians who live and work in Jerusalem actually mean when they refer to their daily encounters with the Israeli occupation as ‘normal’? Is this a psychological coping mechanism, or anything beyond?
Although mostly referring to my interlocutors' daily routine, I would also refer to their experiences at times of crisis, and especially to the impact of the current war in Israel/Palestine.
In this paper, I offer potential explanations to these questions and show how these everyday experiences shape these development workers' radical imagination of the future.
Nimmi Rangaswamy (International Institute of Information Technology) Tanmay Goyal (IIIT Hyderabad)
Paper short abstract:
From a study of food delivery workers, we examine the precarity and consolidation of working conditions driven by the platform economy in the context of Urban India. We consider ‘gigging’, the informalization of labor, and the need to reconceptualize worker well-being.
Paper long abstract:
From a study of food delivery workers and the informalisation of labor ( Shaikh et al 2023)we attempt to reconceptualize worker well-being in the context of Urban India. We point to the contradictions in conceptualizing platform work in India as marginalization and consolidating employability. In the absence of a formal employment sector, platform work, however precarious, offers a sense of regularity and persistence of work. The study is an ethnography of everyday work practices, contexts, and conditions of food delivery workers in three metropolitan cities in India. Through characterizing delivery work, we bring to fore uncertainty amidst the employability of delivery persons and narratives of food delivery journeys.
If traffic conditions, wait times, and unsafe neighborhoods become everyday threats to life, the digital platform endangers the delivery worker towards completing demand-driven daily targets. At the end of a workday, “... what one earns is how much one has broken ground, sped in dangerous traffic, and delivered food at doorsteps without hoping for a tip…”. Despite the ‘illusion of choice’ and ‘algorithmic despotism’ (Griesbach et al. 2019) of food delivery platforms, workers are mindful of the opportunities that come by: as a delivery worker spoke ”... there is a variety of platforms, getting banned from one leads us to another platform.. this work can reward and punish us…” Borrowing the idea and spirit of Scott’s ‘Weapons of the Weak’ (Scott 1985) our study highlights the vexed duality of ‘gig’ labor in the context of India and by extension in developing countries.
Swapnil Dhanraj (O.P. Jindal Global University, India)
Paper short abstract:
The practice of manual scavenging in Indian society is a caste based occupation which reinstates caste hierarchies. The paper, based on primary data, argues that manual scavengers are restricted to relatively insignificant spaces where they find themselves absolutely marginalized.
Paper long abstract:
The practice of caste-based untouchability has had a historical presence in Indian society, where the populations were categorized as per caste hierarchies. The lowest rung of the hierarchy, which consisted of the untouchables (known as Dalits in modern India), didn't have the right to access knowledge and employment. The only form of employment/ livelihood available to them was the service to the touchable, which didn't consist of any remuneration. Though it has been banned in modern Indian society, a significant chunk of the population from the Dalit community continues to engage in the practice of manual scavenging for their survival. Even if the people from this community try to change their occupations in order to get dignified work/employment, the caste prejudices continue to block their way to get a new job or vocation.
Their generations can't aspire to get respectable jobs. The irony is that after state intervention, they have been denied a dignified life. It is in this context that the paper argues that forcing them to practice this occupation as a means of their livelihood has a strong social undertone. The paper is based on the interviews of the people who are involved in the practice of manual scavenging as their hereditary occupation. The practice of manual scavenging is built around the notion of 'purity and pollution’, which reinstates caste hierarchies. The paper further argues that manual scavengers within their own country are restricted to relatively insignificant spaces where they find themselves absolutely marginalized.
Jelena Radovic-Fanta (Governors State University)
Paper short abstract:
Since 2017 over 100,000 Haitians migrated to Chile drawn by promises of work and lax migratory policies. This project studies precarious labor in the grape-export industry in the Aconcagua Valley, examining the labor intersections of Afro-Caribbean migration and indigenous Mapuche labor force.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past seven years, more than 100,000 Haitian nationals—alongside Venezuelan and Colombian nationals—migrated to Chile attracted by promises of work and lax migratory policies in the country. After arriving to the capital Santiago, many turned to nearby regions such as the Aconcagua Valley finding seasonal employment in the grape-export sector. Characterized by long hours and hazardous working conditions, seasonal fruit labor relies on low-income employees, indigenous workforce, and more recently, immigrant labor. Based on a longitudinal ethnographic project, this work examines the intersections of Afro-Caribbean migratory workforce and the indigenous Mapuche workforce as they make a living and create endurance throughout seasonal employment.
This paper explores a paradox of a country that has built its national identity as one without racial differences, while invisibilizing a history of racialized employment and selective migration. Although Chile’s fruit-export industry has been internationally heralded for its “successful” growth, the experiences of laborers during the harvest season and off-season reveal the cracks of a starkly fragmented society. Placed in context of the recent 2019 Social Explosion, demographic changes, and rising xenophobia, this project examines how seasonal laborers navigate shifting economic and social terrain, engendering betterment of everyday life.
Hugo Valenzuela Garcia (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) Jose Luis Molina (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
Unstable employment leads to fragmented and unfulfilling lives. A long-term anthropological study conducted in Spain found that precarious work affects personal and professional relationships, emotional well-being, and future expectations, leading to what Butler (206) defines as "precarious lives".
Paper long abstract:
According to Butler (2006), the rise of precarious jobs has resulted in unstable, fragmented, and unsatisfying lifestyles. This concept is not only rooted in Marxist theory, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of infrastructure, structure, and superstructure, but is also supported by contemporary ethnographies conducted in various countries, including Japan (Allison, 1992), Italy (Molé), Trinidad (Prentice), and Greece. Precarious work not only negatively impacts physical and mental health, but more crucially, it affects individuals' social interactions, emotional well-being, value systems, and expectations. This paper presents the findings of a long-term study conducted in Spain, which utilized a mixed methodology of anthropological fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and analysis of personal networks to collect 60 case studies. The study investigates the impact of precarious work on personal and work relationships, time management, perception of the future, and values. The study concludes that the subjectivation of precariousness has devastating effects on individuals' personal and work relationships, time management, perception of the future, and values. Through this proposal the paper aims to rethink the concept of “precarious society” (or, in other words, how material conditions of precarious existence end up influencing the foundations of the culture of the modern society to come).
Aman - (University of Hamburg)
Paper short abstract:
Exploring the nuances of academic life at a research institute in Germany, where some scholars consider the environment as 'neoliberal' and 'feudal' at the same time, this paper looks at the affective lives of those who work in such an environment through a phenomenological lens.
Paper long abstract:
Generally considered to be part of a ‘privileged’ class, academicians are thought to occupy a position beyond the anxieties of job precarity and instability. The recent debate around the academic fixed-term contract law in Germany, however, highlights the sense of existential insecurity that many scholars experience due to the conditions of employment in the country which bars scholars from remaining in academia if, after a stipulated period of twelve years (with a few exceptions), they fail to secure a tenured job. Following these and other structural conditions, this paper explores how academics at a prominent research institute in Germany experience and model their selves in light of the looming uncertainty over their career. Taking a phenomenological approach through the work of Hermann Schmitz and scholars of Affect like Sara Ahmed, I show how feelings of ‘disillusionment’ or being a ‘failure’, among others like ‘optimism’ or ‘fear’, arise not merely as subjective states rooted in the psyche of scholars but as an affective atmosphere. This atmosphere, I argue, is produced as a result of complex dynamics of gender, family and migration background, and the ability and willingness to be mobile, to name a few elements. After tracing some of these emotions that were shared with me during fieldwork, I explore how the variations in experience and outlook come about but also focus on the way structures of care and solidarity emerge among those who find themselves in a liminal position.
Hannah Bartels (Hamburg University)
Paper short abstract:
After the Romanian Jiu Valley’s transition away from coal, the region’s inhabitants are coping on a narrow labour market. This paper shows how the region's young adults take the first steps towards their professional future in circumstances of change, limited and insecure employment, and precarity.
Paper long abstract:
The Romanian Jiu Valley has seen major changes in the past 30 years. Previously, the region’s 14 coal mines have mono-industrially shaped every aspect of life here. With ten of the mines shut down, the remaining four soon to follow, the population in the region’s six cities has halved, employment opportunities have decreased, and most salaries barely cover employees’ essential needs. The region is on a continued quest for viable post-coal futures, while at the present time the shrinking public services, a handful of factories, a threadbare service industry, and an at best aspirational tourism sector make for limited employment options and precarious work experiences.
This paper explores the trajectories of young adults who remain in the Jiu Valley after finishing their school education. In contrast to many of their peers who move to bigger Romanian cities or Western and Central Europe for continued education or work, they make their first work and employment experiences on the precarious labour market of their home region. I will trace their everyday lives as young adults making futural decision about and first steps in their work life on the background of severe deindustrialisation. Through their successes and frustrations, a highly gendered labour market reveals itself, and the role of class and family circumstances as well as the continued power of mining salaries become apparent. In the discrepancies between wishing, planning, and lived realities emerge insights about what living and working in the Jiu Valley should and might look like in the future.
Aleksandra Dzik (Adam Mickiewicz Univrsity, Poznan, Poland)
Paper short abstract:
In my presentation, I would like to present the situation of young Bangladeshis who face the difficult realities of the labor market in their country. During the field research, many of them shared with me their stories about the difficulties of work and daily life.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary Bangladesh exposes young people entering the labor market not only to the uncertainty of finding a job, but also to high competitiveness and low wages. Such conditions particularly affect young unskilled people to whom the country's capital appears as a dream come true and a chance for a better life. The strong ties that are maintained in Bangladeshi families indicate an obligation to parents and siblings to support and help with the hardships of daily life. This obligation puts additional pressure and burden on young people who, being unaccustomed to urban life, must face not only the cultural weight of the situation, but also the hardships of living in a big city. However, this situation is faced by less educated people from poorer families. Low wages allow them to live modestly and, not infrequently, live in apartments shared among many people. These conditions make their biggest dream to leave such a life and go abroad in search of happiness and well-being.
In my speech, I would like to present the situation of young people who travel to Dhaka from the agricultural areas of Bangladesh to improve the living situation for themselves and their families. I would like to focus on the conditions of their lives, work, salaries, but also on the dreams and aspirations that drive them.