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Paper short abstract:

Based on an analysis of Portuguese care policies and on research in paid and unpaid contexts of home care in old age in Lisbon, this presentation explores the intersections between home as a place of (desired) wellbeing at ageing, and as a workplace marked by inequalities and ambiguities.

Paper long abstract:

Is home care the best care? The home is often considered in public, institutional and political discourse to be the best place to grow old. As the place where most care is provided, it’s also a place marked by different types of unrecognized care work, with a high burden and physical, psychological, economic and labour impacts. When it’s paid, it’s characterized by a continuum of devaluation and feminization and by racial-ethnical inequalities.

Care policies in Portugal have continuously developed from a familistic perspective: formal social care is complementary, for when the family is unable to fulfil its “responsibilities”. In 2019 the informal care status was created, with different support measures for (some) non-paid family carers. Even with a big lack of accessibility and affordability, home care services are also growing, being the type of paid care for older people with more vacancies (GEP-MTSSS 2021). These changes are taking place in a context of resource restraint with a primary concern for the sustainability of social and health systems, which requires strong attention to the risks of continued privatization and (re)familiarization of home care.

Based on an analysis of Portuguese care policies and on research in paid and unpaid contexts of elderly home care in Lisbon, this presentation explores the intersections between home as a place of (desired) wellbeing at ageing, and as a workplace marked by inequalities and invisibilities, critically reflecting on the domicilisation of care, particularly in a familistic context where home care is dominantly politically and morally idealized.

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Paper short abstract:

Focusing on women’s experiences of collaborative workspaces (CWS) in non-urban contexts of Austria and Greece, this study explores the multifaceted role of such spaces as social infrastructures beyond conventional work environments.

Paper long abstract:

Collaborative workspaces (CWS) such as coworking spaces, maker spaces, or creative hubs, have gained popularity as an alternative to traditional offices. Increasingly, such spaces can be found outside major cities, however, little is known about the roles they play for their users living and working in such areas. Focusing on women’s experiences of four CWS with different organisation models in Austria and Greece, the study explores how these spaces can act as critical social infrastructures beyond conventional work environments. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews and participant observations, the research uncovers the multifaceted roles of CWS as flexible, safe, empowering spaces for personal and professional development, and networking. CWS seem to serve a wider social function, operating both as second (workplaces) and third places (gathering/socialising places) besides the home (first place). Importantly, the study illustrates how CWS for female users may represent a room of their own - a separate space from home which typically constitutes a site of unpaid care labour, disproportionally carried out by women. The research aims to address reports of women’s experiences in these spaces, so far overlooked in literature, thereby contributing our understanding of such new sites in the changing world of work.

This contribution presents findings from the author’s ongoing qualitative study for her dissertation on gender perspectives from CWS in rural and peripheral areas, exemplified by four cases in Austria and Greece.

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Paper short abstract:

The categories of male-female, productive-reproductive and paid-unpaid work are insufficient to understand the contemporary meanings that Rapa Nui culture attributes to work. Within family-based work structures, Rapa Nui people associate work with necessity, interest and personal self-realization.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of decentering the study of gender labor inequalities allows us to reflect on the limits of the binary categories of male and female work, productive and reproductive, and paid and unpaid work in order to understand the contemporary meanings that the Rapa Nui ethnic group attributes to work.

In the Rapa Nui culture, people associate work with necessity, interest and personal self-realization. Most people learn to carry out multiple subsistence activities within the family from a very early age. Traditional work cultures, based on the use of the territory's resources, both material and symbolic, and on the practical transmission of knowledge, coexist and are complemented by more institutionalized occupations. This results in articulated and flexible family-based work structures. The latter is not only valued as a distinctive feature of Polynesian culture, but has also proved to be a valuable resource for subsistence in times of pandemic. Based on the ethnographic method, we present part of the results of the research project "Descentering Gender inequalities", Chile (ATE 210051).

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This paper explores volunteer labor to maintain the long-neglected Eastern Cemetery (Kentucky, US). Volunteers’ place-based meanings develop at the intersection of their everyday acts of care for the site and growing understandings of its history of over-burial, abandonment, and necroviolence.

Paper long abstract:

How do place-based meanings develop at the intersection of care and abandonment? This paper explores how volunteer maintenance of a neglected cemetery in Kentucky (US) produces complex meanings that tie together positive impacts volunteers ascribed to their work and embodied knowledge of the site’s violent past produced through this labor.

In 1989 a whistleblower exposed the clandestine 150-year history of massive over-burial at Louisville’s Eastern Cemetery. With the owners forced into bankruptcy and the cemetery moved into a series of court-appointed managers, the 29-acre (12-hectare) site became neglected and overgrown. Headstones were toppled, stolen, or sunk, and the site became an overgrown space in the city’s core. In 2013, a group of volunteers began to maintain the site, organizing weekly mowing and trimming, and fundraising to replace missing fences and broken gates. A decade into their work, Eastern remains caught at the intersection of care and neglect. In interviews with core volunteers, they express the importance of this labor to their identity and discuss how Eastern became profoundly meaningful in their lives. Their labor, however, also impresses upon volunteers the present-day impacts of Eastern’s history of necroviolence (De León 2015): they struggle in the summer humidity to manage invasive plants, recoil as mowers hit hidden headstsones, twist ankles in sunken ground, and, at times, face families who place blame for the site’s condition on those seeking to remedy it. This paper explores how voluntary labor evokes these embodied contradictions that merge care and neglect into narratives of place-based meaning.

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This presentation analyses my findings in the glass-making city of Firozabad, North India, through a historical anthropology perspective. I show how the history of bangles production reveals the complex influences between Bohemia and India in terms of shaping the workplaces.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation analyses my findings in the glass-making city of Firozabad, North India, through a historical anthropology perspective. I show how the history of bangles production, which is grounded in the exchanges between colonial empires and continues in contemporary globalization is revealing the complex influences in terms of techniques but also the very shaping of the workplaces between Bohemia and India. Though bangles have been produced in Firozabad for centuries, the industrial Indian Bangles production techniques did not come from India itself but were designed in the late 19th century in the bohemia coty of Jablonec, which was a center producing imitation jewelry with an industry separated between the mass production of glass rods as raw material in factories, and cottage work for the late stages of fabrication. the techniques were then transferred to India, in Firozabad hence shaping the city's workplaces. Therefore, I argue that this lesser-known origin of the techniques has made the originality of Firozanad a peculiar cluster city, developing a symbiosis between factory and housework, while the neighboring clusters, like Moradabad and Shararanpur, develop either solely a housework activity, either a frank separation between housework and factories (I.e Moradabad) which probably determined many social dynamics between the factory and the house workplaces.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the strategies of territorialization implemented by riders or home delivery workers in the city of Seville. Through the application of the ethnographic method we discuss their ways of appropriation, delimitation and signification of urban space as a place of work.

Paper long abstract:

Workers develop everyday strategies of territorialization, which involve specific forms of appropriation, delimitation and signification of space. Such forms of territorialization are therefore diverse, depend on the unique characteristics of each job and offer clues about the material conditions of employment, obligations, knowledge and expectations of each group of workers. In the case of the riders or home delivery workers, their strategies of territorialization are developed in a unique context marked by mobility, the mediation of virtual platforms and the potential consideration of the whole city as a workplace. In this paper we apply the TPSN approach (Jessop et al. 2008) to discuss the strategies territorialization of the riders attending to the articulation between different territories, places, scales and networks. For this purpose, we provide ethnographic data produced in an ongoing research project on the socio-spatial analysis of labor relations in the logistics industry. Specifically, we address the experience of riders in the city of Seville.

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Paper short abstract:

Commuting has been a mass practice both in communism and in capitalism. This research explores in an extended case manner the lived experiences of workers who commute daily to their workplace situated in Jucu - Tetarom III Industrial Park, in the Metropolitan Area of Cluj-Napoca.

Paper long abstract:

Commuting, the daily journey from home to work and back, has been a mass practice in Romania during communism due to the gap between industrialization and urbanization. High level of industrialization requires more workers than the number living in urban areas, thus commuting has been seen as the solution for this gap. Currently, in capitalism, this practice proliferates as a means to lower the costs of production of the global capital companies attracted by local cheap labour force and by various benefits offered by the Romanian state.

The living standards of workers traveling daily long distances from rural areas (sometimes without paved roads, sewage or natural gas) to workplaces that pay wages insufficient for decent living is rather contradictory with the economic proliferation of the metropolitan areas of major cities. Cluj-Napoca has the fastest economic growth rate of all Romanian cities and is considered an important ‘pole’ of economic development, based on macro indicators. The connection between commuting and development is tight and reveals a relation of uneven geographical development, with pockets of wealth, in a sea of poverty and underdevelopment. Thus, the intersection between space and work is analyzed critically.

In an extended case study approach, I explore through semi structured interviews and public policies analysis how development strategies influence the lived experiences of workers who commute daily to their workplace situated in Jucu - Tetarom III Industrial Park, in the Metropolitan Area of Cluj-Napoca.

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This paper explores how how individuals, businesses, and government entities confront dominant industry shifts in the Appalachian region of the US through the remaking of place.

Paper long abstract:

Dominant industries on which regions may depend are often closely linked to place-based identity and local lifeways through economic exchange, material goods, systems of gendered labor and migration, or even relationships with corporate entities. In the Appalachian region of the United States, the dominance of the coal, lumber, and agriculture industries have shaped both cultural values, and fostered “thick” economic and migratory relationships between urban and rural areas of the region. As Appalachia now faces the permanent decline of coal and works to capture new opportunities in manufacturing and technology, the region must engage in a process of remaking a place-based rural identity. This paper asks how individuals, businesses, and government entities confront both larger popular perceptions of the region as isolated or bucolic, and local challenges such a gendered divisions of labor influenced by the coal industry, to shape new kinds of economic futures. I explore how former coal industry workers’ ambivalence about narratives of economic collapse relate to their pursuit of work in high-tech machining and software development, how manufacturing workers negotiate cross-cultural interactions in attempts to forge global economic ties, and how women see themselves taking on new roles in industries historically dominated by men. Such examples inform our understanding of the ways that place and work are co-constructed.

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Paper short abstract:

Exploring intersections between place and work, this paper discusses transformation in newsrooms in the global south. Post-digitization, news collection, and dissemination cease to have a fixed place. The paper examines place-based challenges within the journalistic profession in contemporary India.

Paper long abstract:

Deuze (2014) contends that worldwide migration of capital and labor, digitalization, environmental concerns, and global conflicts have made societies less cohesive and present times unsettling. Polarization within media systems, further convergences of media formats, and the coming of newer journalistic forms and practices have put journalism in a precarious position. On the one hand, journalism tries to reiterate and reflect upon age-old practices and values. On the other hand, however, it also has to surf through a rapidly changing and unsettling environment. With digitalization being the central force, the shift in the places where journalists work has had the most lasting impact on the profession. Usher (2019) considers the place to be more than just the setting where journalists do their work. The setting also brings under its purview their daily routines and practices (Usher 2019). Borrowing from Taylor (1999), Gieryn (2000), and Usher (2019), the place is not considered the same as space. It is not just an abstract setting but also an agentic player that lets journalists draw identity and meaning. This paper foregrounds the pivotal importance of the variable of place in the practice of journalism by looking at the transformations in the sites of news production and dissemination. The approach is to assess the decoupling of journalists’ claims of witnessing and recording unfolding events based on their proximity to the same. This was carried out through an ethnographic study of diverse newsrooms in North India.

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Paper short abstract:

Foregrounding workers’ views on labour uncertainty in an extremely localised textile industry, this paper suggests how ethnographic attention to connections between work and place can reveal overlooked forms of belonging and place-making, unsettling expectations about provenance and rootedness.

Paper long abstract:

The famous woollen textile known as Harris Tweed has been trademark-protected since 1910 and covered by its own Act of Parliament since 1993. According to this legislation, a cloth can only be stamped as Harris Tweed if it ‘has been handwoven by the islanders at their homes in the Outer Hebrides, finished in the Outer Hebrides, and made from pure virgin wool dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides’ (Harris Tweed Act 1993:6).

Despite this extremely localised production, the cloth is exported to over 50 countries around the world – providing employment in a region threatened by depopulation and economic fragility, but also exposing islanders to the vagaries of shifting global markets. And while popular representations emphasise the ‘provenance’ and ‘heritage’ of Harris Tweed, a closer look reveals that the industry is more inclusive than might be expected – welcoming not only ‘locals’ and ‘returners’, but also ‘incomers’ to the islands as valued employees.

In this paper, I suggest that ethnographic attention to workers’ outlooks on ‘local’ uncertainty contributes to thinking critically about the relationship between work and place, uncovering social dynamics that might otherwise be overlooked. Drawing on thirteen months of fieldwork, I consider how industry workers drew on local histories and repertoires to navigate labour uncertainty and ‘island life’ – whether they were locals, returners or incomers. These insights suggest alternative possibilities for thinking about rootedness, belonging and place-making, and foreground how ethnographic attention to work-place dynamics can illuminate diverse experiences of work and life in contemporary capitalism.