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- Convenors:
-
Hugo Valenzuela Garcia
(Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona)
Federico Besserer Alatorre (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana)
Regnar Kristensen (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Federico Besserer Alatorre
(Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana)
- Discussant:
-
Regnar Kristensen
(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Geografia i Història 302
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
The panel deals with the sociocultural impacts of precarious jobs and the way people resist or adapt to these control regimes. In particular, we focus on the emotional and relational impacts and the way in which this precariousness contributes to generating a new precarious society and culture.
Long Abstract:
The world of work is changing rapidly, although there is one constant: the widening gap between meaningful, well-paid, and socially prestigious jobs, alongside a large number of precarious, temporary, low-paid, and exploitative jobs. The expansion of control technologies (algorithms, platforms, AI , etc.) makes this situation more complex. Job insecurity and high unemployment rates, alongside the weakness of the welfare state and the erosion of social ties, contribute to the growing exclusion of regular citizens. And probably such a trend has worsened because of the pandemic crisis. At the same time, in our modern, liberal, and democratic societies, there is a strong pressure for individuals to achieve full autonomy and self-sufficiency (Caldwell, 2004: 3).
Following Sennet’s (2006), Allison’s (2013) and Butler’s (2004) insights, we would like to explore the way in which such job insecurity filters through and expands into daily relationships, today ephemeral and fragmented. We wonder how these fragile, unstable, deplorable labour relations impact social, affective, and emotional relationships.
The suffering and hopelessness derived from precarious lives may generate existential emptiness, substance abuse or massive consumption of anxiolytics. However, beyond material precariousness, these new ways of earning a living structure people's behaviors, social arrangements, values, or expectations. What is the narrative of the people who suffer from it? Where and how do they get the strength to carry on? What imaginaries are generated from these realities? How does all this affect citizen participation?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore the entanglement of rural migrant workers’ expectations and aspirations about better opportunities with the realities of precarious working life in urban Ethiopia.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, Ethiopia has become Africa’s most attractive destination for labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing industries for several companies from economically emerging countries interested in searching for “cheap labor” for their labor-intensive industries. The expansion of industrial parks across the country’s major cities drew a large number of labor migrant youths from rural villages to the cities in search of industrial work. The majority of these first-generation industrial labor migrants are young women seeking work, independence, and a better urban life. Drawing on fieldwork in two foreign garment companies in Bole Lemi Industrial Park (BLIP) in Addis Ababa, this paper examines how the factories’ demand to employ young laborers has fed the motivations and aspirations of scores of young rural labor migrants to work in the industrial park and how their expectations entangled with everyday precarious working life. Young rural migrants associate labor migration with escaping rural poverty and realizing their future life goals. They imagined the city as a source of opportunity for a better future. However, the migrant workers’ expectations—better city life vis-à-vis realities of factory work— the global industrial work ethic and discipline have become the new challenges. For instance, factory workers have meager wages, which are no longer adequate to sustain their lives. As a result, workers turn to other strategies to cope with such forms of life, such as living in new types of arrangements (e.g., cohabitation) and sex work.
Paper short abstract:
This talks investigates how labor and emotions relate within the affective space of modern postural yoga (MPY) in Turkey with a view as to peel and thus examine two layers of emotional labor: “emotional toll” and “emotional spillover.”
Paper long abstract:
This talks investigates how labor and emotions relate within the affective space of modern postural yoga (MPY) in Turkey with a view as to peel and thus examine two layers of emotional labor: “emotional toll” and “emotional spillover.” I argue that MPY imposes competition and rivalry on instructors which takes an emotional toll especially since they must manage norms around “disinterestedness” given yoga’s affective normative space and the everyday struggle to earn a living amidst precarity. Second, I argue that MPY is characterized by a therapeutic invasion as part of global “psychotherapeutic” domination which not only pressures instructors in Turkey to perform certain emotions and hide others during yoga sessions but also spills over into their everyday creating lasting impacts on their emotional practices and sociabilities. The talk is based on 22 in-depth interviews I conducted with yoga instructors in 2022 and 2023, mostly in Istanbul as well as my observations at an Istanbul yoga studio between 2011 and 2020.
Paper short abstract:
This communication seeks to analyze the connections between loneliness and precarious labour among individuals aged 18 to 30 in the city of Madrid (Spain). These connections, far from being univocal ambivalent, encompassing aspects such as alienation and discomfort, as well as agency and resistance
Paper long abstract:
The phenomenon of loneliness has been publicly constructed as a foremost social issue - a hallmark of the 21st-century pandemic - essentially viewed as negative, with individual and subjective roots linked to psychobiological processes. However, contributions from the anthropology of loneliness extensively problematize this matter. Towards this topic, sustained ethnographic fieldwork spanning over two years with individuals aged 18 to 30 in the city of Madrid (Spain) and its Metropolitan Area regarding loneliness proves that, in contrast to the public construction of loneliness, it is a socio-cultural affect, at times contradictory and ambivalent, rooted in structural and cultural processes that go beyond mere individual experiences.
Within this framework, waged labour and the logics of precarization are described by the young individuals involved in the ethnographic work as major causes and motivations for the experienced loneliness. Job insecurity, associated with neoliberal flexibility, the characteristic labour/working precariousness among the youth in Southern Europe, the often contradictory new logics of corporative management, the diminishing significance of the workplace as a motor of socialization, or what Boltanski and Chiapello (2002) have termed "connective capitalism" are some of the labour-related elements observed following the widespread emergence of such affect. Thus, this communication aims to analyze the links between loneliness and waged labour, which, far from being univocal, are complex and ambivalent, encompassing aspects such as alienation, fatigue, and discomfort, as well as agency and forms of resistance.
Paper short abstract:
What happens when people have a computer as their closest supervisor at work and a smartphone as their companion during off-hours? I attempt to answer this question by examining international labor migrants in their workplaces, as well as mapping their general personal social networks.
Paper long abstract:
What happens when people have a computer as their closest supervisor at work and a smartphone as their companion during off-hours? I attempt to answer this question by examining international labor migrants in logistic centers in Copenhagen and Barcelona, as well as mapping their general personal social networks. My preliminary findings suggest that the capability of labor migrants to socialize with peers has been restricted. On one hand, computers have replaced middle-managers in their work. While these "computer-middle-managers" issue commands and communicate, they do not create a space for developing deeper social relationships with co-workers. On the other hand, smartphones have provided a solution to maintaining social connections without geographical limitations. For international labor migrants with irregular working hours, this serves as a welcome platform to stay connected with family and friends far away, yet it also appears to disconnect them from individuals in similar situations in their immediate proximity. This requires further analysis on the relational damages the technological advances have on precarious labor migrants.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines labor precarity among migrants in Norway, revealing their pursuit of freedom and protection from precarity through informality and the gig economy. However, it underscores the limitations of this quest, as it falls short in providing emancipatory belonging and alternative futures.
Paper long abstract:
Nordic labor markets are renowned for their strong protection of workers through highly regulated and secure employment, decent wages, and comprehensive welfare benefits. However, an emerging body of research points to processes of work precarization in the region, highlighting factors such as the flexibilization and de-regulation of labor relations, as well as processes of globalization and migration.
In this paper, I explore migrants’ experiences in three Norwegian labor sectors: construction, cleaning, and on-demand platform/gig work. Drawing on ethnographic field work and interviews with workers and stakeholders (unions, NGOs), I show how labor-, welfare-, and border regimes intersect in shaping migrant workers’ experiences of precarity. I highlight the strategies migrants develop to cope with work precarity but also to seek emotional well-being, construct life projects, and free themselves from compounded relations of domination. To some, informal work—highly criminalized in Norway—offers alternative social protection, as formalized but precarious labor contracts and street-level bureaucrats’ internal bordering practices limit their access to welfare services and hence to full citizenship. Others find “peace of mind” in the new, often deemed precarious platform economy which provides “freedom” from even more precarious low-wage jobs. I examine these discourses of “protection” and “freedom”, which I argue diverge from the imaginaries of alternative futures as well as the search for "emancipatory belonging" that are evident in the migrants’ broader narratives and life histories. While challenging Nordic exceptionalism, the paper contributes to the theorization of labor precarity and migrant belonging, developing the notion of belonging as both precarious and emancipatory.
Paper short abstract:
This contribution emphasizes emergencies' role in generating and perpetuating precarious conditions in the Italian asylum reception system, showcasing workers' agency and resistance both inside and outside the workplace.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, 'crisis' and 'emergency' have been central in defining the contemporary experiences, particularly in socio-economic, political, and existential dimensions, with a focus on migration. The 'migration crisis' (2015) that significantly impacted Italy's asylum reception system shaped it with the 'paradigm of emergency'. The influx of arrivals led to a demand for personnel, forming a workforce primarily composed of highly educated young women with strong personal motivation. However, they grapple with uncertain labor contexts influenced by emergency rhetoric, disrupting both humanitarian and bureaucratic frameworks.
Within this system, labor conflicts and social friction emerge due to the precarious nature of those employed. This unfolds on both a socio-economic dimension, shaped by external forces, and an intimate, existential dimension arising from ruptures within one's 'teleology of life.' The resulting disorder, encompassing material and emotional aspects, outlines a complex existential condition, manifested in an ontological dimension through specific forms of self-representation. It stems from the feeling of being unable to 'navigate' the process, 'reach' the 'hoped-for near future,' or 'align' the present with personal aspirations, dismissing any 'promise of stability.'
Drawing from extensive ethnographic experience as a social operator and a researcher within the asylum reception system, this contribution emphasizes emergencies' role in generating and perpetuating precariousness in both labor and the intimate existential sphere, manifesting inside and outside the workplace. Ethnographically illustrating how workers in this social arena develop strategies to navigate and resist existential oppression demonstrates significant agency and the ability to critique and rethink the operative system.
Paper short abstract:
Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong are vulnerable. This vulnerability has historically and culturally developed, continuing to permeate these women's lives. However, the processes of segregation that occur are being challenged by the online relationships in which these women engage.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to address the persistent vulnerability of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong by employing an intersectional approach and highlighting two distinct aspects of this vulnerability.
First, I aim to demonstrate how the vulnerability of Filipino domestic workers has been, and continues to be, shaped by the cultural and historical contexts of slavery and colonialism, conceptual metaphors, migration policies, and labor conditions. These factors play a significant role in media discourses and influence behaviors, attitudes, and developments in the daily lives of Filipino domestic workers. They are the root causes of vulnerability, which simultaneously lead to various processes of marginalization and segregation.
Second, I seek to illustrate how domestic workers' perceptions of their own vulnerability are revealed through the sharing of everyday difficulties, particularly online. This sharing appears to foster an identity-based network, or even a sense of sisterhood, and a form of soft-power activism. These online interactions become a space where segregation and marginalization are challenged, and strategies for resistance and survival are developed.
Paper short abstract:
Against the backdrop of the constant movement and precarity for many Latinx workers in Barcelona's gig-economy, this paper will explore how the creation of an urban garden (huerto) provides an alternative sphere of slowness and non-monetised reciprocity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore how, for some Latinx migrants, the growth and exchange of plants creates an alternative sphere to urban neoliberal precarity. Barcelona is made up by populations placed in hierarchies, each with their own rhythms of movement and displacement in the city's labour markets. I will focus on physical movement and frequent change as core experiential vectors that shape everyday migrant experience in the city. Stress, tiredness and the over-determination of inter-person dynamics through negative reciprocity ensue. Yet alternative paces exist. During my doctoral fieldwork (2022), I explored how Latinx migrants crafted an urban garden in the heart of the city. Plants provided care relations outside of economic exchange, uprooted plants drew threads of continuity between accommodation fluctuations while inter-ethnic exchanges were equalised outside of a racialised capitalist labour system.
Yet the very ecological shape of the huerto and styles of care within it reflected its place within a wider neoliberal rhythm of movement and change: the frequent removal and entry of plants, the limited space to put plants directly in the ground and the impossibility of food growth. In less diverse urban huertos, more stable work-hours and higher payment allowed for distinctly different cultivation methods, whereby the focus was on building up symbiotic, long-term inter-species dynamics within a "mini-ecosystem". I will conclude by exploring how manifestations of green spaces in the city and the grassroots wellness potentialities within them have to be understood in relation to neoliberal markets and the hierarchical inscription of citizens within this.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork on Chinese online ride-hailing drivers and food delivery riders, this paper critically examines platform workers' nuanced perceptions of precarity and their coping strategies. The research explores what is important and what gives their lives a sense of purpose.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to investigate the impact of digitally-mediated platform work on individuals’ daily lives, labour practices, and social relations by focusing on online ride-hailing drivers and food delivery riders in China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from July 2018 to September 2022 in a small city in southern China, this research attempts to challenge existing theories in platform work studies and to destabilise the critique of neoliberalism in the West. Existing studies on platform work mainly centre on labour precaritisation and exploitation, technical and algorithmic labour arrangements and control, and the legitimacy of platform work. This body of literature regards neoliberalism as either an economic system or a form of governmentality. Moreover, these studies view digital platforms as new means of control, depicting platform workers as victims of oppression and subjects of governance. My ethnographic research, however, suggests that platform work offers hope rather than mere deprivation. The overemphasis on the ‘dark’ side of platform work indicates a disengagement from the subjects’ nuanced understandings of precarity. Many studies concentrate solely on workers’ experiences on a specific platform, disregarding their broader life experiences; subjects are often reduced to being mere living sources of economic value. To address this issue, this research employs the life history method to critically examine the impact of platform work on individuals' life experiences. Based on my ethnographic research, individuals participate in platform work not only to make ends meet, but also to pursue freedom, happiness, and new meanings of life, and to fulfil familial obligations.