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Paper short abstract:

This paper embarks on discussing the ruins of socialist industrial modernization and the immanent project of postindustrial capitalism as they shape the everyday lives and livelihoods of industrial workers employed by Gredelj, once the biggest Croatian rolling stock company located in Zagreb.

Paper long abstract:

To think of the ordinary as of impasse shaped by crisis; a zone of convergence of many histories that endangers the good life, is to think of our present, wrote Lauren Berland in Cruel Optimism (2011). This paper embarks on discussing ruins of socialist industrial modernization and the immanent project of postindustrial capitalism as they shape the everyday lives and livelihoods of industrial workers employed by Gredelj, once the biggest Croatian rolling stock company located in Zagreb. Our research follows the release of the hybrid feature film titled What’s to be done? (2023) directed by Croatian filmmaker Goran Dević, and made in collaboration with redundant workers of the Gredelj railway factory. Along the lines of Navaro-Yashin’s affective geographies (2012), we aim at discussing the notion of affective artscapes as new zones of knowledge and affect production. We will show in which ways they enable engagement with the concepts of work, working wo/man, and class, as well as their postindustrial undoing. The narrations of industrial ruinscapes that inform affective artscapes of the film What’s to be done are seen as a vehicle to reach and discuss ever-diminishing ideals of decent work and good life. Our ethnographic material is based on participation in the 10-year film-making project and anthropological consultancy during its making. It stems from narratives collected with the protagonists on the occasion of experimental film screening.

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Paper short abstract:

Negotiated around a social contract of benevolence and marginality, contemporary gleaning simultaneously confirms and decenters socio-economic hierarchies and invokes the possibilities of life entwined in-, yet transgressing racialised and gendered dispossession and ruination under late Capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Gleaning describes the age old right of the subaltern to the remainder and the obligation of the dominant to produce and/or allow access to the remainder under the premise of marginality. This paper traces descriptions of gleaning across space and time before focussing on two contemporary examples from the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal. The first inquires how gleaning for molluscs in the rising and warming deltaic waters is safeguarded as a distinctly female practice and its profitabilty obscured by appeasing ancestral guardian spirits and by evoking a longstanding female subalternity and gleaning’s historical embedding in norms of benevolence and mutual aid. Simultaneously, gleaning allows women to eschew labour relations introduced e.g. by NGO projects. The second example inquires how deltaic deck hands gleaned molluscs from the bycatch of industrial trawlers. By performing the marginality of this bycatch while redescribing its value and exchanging it along female networks, they realised their own gains from it, renegotiated ownership and possession as well as precarious labour. Exploring marginal potentials of given circumstances marked by anthropocenic and capitalist volatilities, gleaning as what I term a ’minor tactic’ thus attunes to- and creates distinct, if entwined minor niches within hierarchical socio-economic relations and their dynamics of dispossession and ruination. It is a fragile practice, permeated by indeterminacy and limits and both confirms and decenters these relations, while breathing a sense of justice and figuring as a larger promise that questions the giveness of hierarchies, the character of work/labour and the establishment of property and value.

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Paper short abstract:

The Chikan hand embroidery production within the neoliberal economic system is undoing of the achievements of women empowerment organisations of 1980s. Such undoings have repercussions for the artisan community; precarious labour conditions, subsistence survival and diminishing social capital.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the gendered labour experiences of indigenous Muslim women artisans of Chikan hand embroidery in the Awadh region of northern India. Chikan embroidery form is native to this region and is believed to have originated during the rule of the Mughals. This art form today has become a multi-million dollar fashion industry recognised worldwide. However, the sole producers of the embroidery- ‘women artisans’ continue to live in precarious life and labour conditions, impinged by violence and exploitation within the family and Chikan production system. The study is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, understanding various aspects of artisans and their art in the Lucknow district of Uttar Pradesh, India. In this paper, I take ‘wages’ and the ‘value of labour’ as analytical categories to show how the ruination of Chikan hand embroidery production is sustained for the artisans. At the same time, the capitalist class (big firms, fashion designers and local business people) continues to hold greater power and influence over the production system. That is to ask how incorporating traditional craft into the neoliberal mass production system ruined these artisan's sense of security and well-being. Further discussing the emergence of women empowerment organisations in the 1980s dedicated to organising artisans has achieved limited benefits. The linkage of empowerment organisations with the broader neoliberal market has become a way of undoing labour rights and work conditions, which was previously achieved. The undoing of artisan community in the current production system leads to various forms of precocity.

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Paper short abstract:

How does Cuba's growing population of licensed private entrepreneurs conceptualize and interpret their efforts to earn a living? I demonstrate how multiple historical meanings of labor coexist and intersect in today's Cuba, in a process characterized by both continuity and change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates how the growing population of licensed private entrepreneurs in Cuba, commonly known as cuentapropistas, conceptualize and interpret their efforts to earn a living. Can “business” count as proper labor in a nation governed by a communist party? What constitutes a valuable worker? These questions have come up for debate in new ways in recent years in Cuba, as the government has opened the way for a legal private sector, transforming how citizens can legally make a living. This paper posits that the symbolic significance of “work” (trabajo) in Cuba is undergoing a period of flux, corresponding to the ongoing rebalancing of social forces on the island.

The dynamic nature of this situation is evident in the struggles of licensed entrepreneurs to define the meaning of their livelihood efforts on various fronts, both in relation to unlicensed hustlers and the state. Cuba’s licensed entrepreneurs invent new distinctions while simultaneously perpetuating established connotations of labor, insisting that they are in fact legitimate “workers”. While constituting the “non-state” economic sector in Cuba, these licensed entrepreneurs nonetheless assert their pride and labor value by emphasizing their connection to the state. Consequently, my paper challenges the notion of a Cuban “transition” where new market actors distinctly break away from a state-led economic system. Instead, I illustrate how multiple historical meanings coexist and intersect, and how even long-gone pasts of labor organization and representation give rise to social tensions, in a process characterized by both continuity and change.

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Given the dynamics of instrumentality, service, and complicity that have surrounded 'the engineer' in modernity, this paper excavates whether and how Australian carbon capture and storage (CCS) experts see, or do not see, pro-social values within their work to build futures for fossil energy.

Paper long abstract:

Energy and its effects on the climate have become dominant themes of the arrival to the 21st century and the recognition of deepening patterns of destruction and erosion in modernization's wake. Although contested, imaginative inheritances from modernity still shape what comes to count as the character of an "energy engineer" and visions of why such labor is knowledge-based, aspirational, and socially care-ful. Yet in "late industrialism" (Fortun 2012), changes in how energy has become an object of public intervention and concern have contributed to reshaping the prerequisites and opportunities for being an “energy expert" (Smith 2021). Given the dynamics of instrumentality (Heidegger, Ellul, Taylor), service (Veblen, Sennett, Smith), and complicity (Marcuse, Nobel, Ottinger, Subramanian) that have surrounded the characterization of an engineering expert from the mid 20th century to today, this paper digs into the question of whether and how Australian carbon capture and storage (CCS) experts see a pro-social vision in their endeavors to create next-generation fossil energy technology. Within contested forms of technology development that may be perceived as image-oriented or extractivist, what are the contours of the vision of service and responsibility that remains? How does the valorization of entrepreneural opportunism and technoscientific knowledge, now located in small, fragmented, and competing businesses rather than in state utilities and labs, coexist with contestation over whether and how new extractive infrastructures can serve pro-social ends?

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Paper short abstract:

I explore two waves of deindustrialisation and undoing in the Estonian oil shale industry and -labour. Although both resulted in mine closures, workers reacted differently to the undoing of industrial labour during the postsocialist transition in 2010 and the Green transition in 2022-23.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores two waves of deindustrialisation and undoing in the Estonian oil shale industry and -labour. Although the volume of mining has continually been in decline since the 1980s in the Ida-Virumaa, there is a difference between the reactions, narratives and visions for the future linked to mine closures during the postsocialist transition I studied in 2010 and the Green transition in 2022-23. In 2010, the narratives of loss of respect, dignity, and regional and corporate autonomy were common as mines were being closed, management restructured, and workers laid off. When returning to the field in 2022 in the framework of the CINTRAN project on just transition in four European regions, I expected the earlier fear of unemployment and poverty, disillusionment with the state and a sense of victimhood to be dominant among the Russian-speaking mine workers.

The European decarbonisation policy and Green transition requiring the reduction of electricity production from polluting oil shale has indeed evoked narratives of a ‘social catastrophe’ but not necessarily workers but union representatives and local leaders. But among workers, whose fathers and themselves had already experienced crises of lay-offs and mine closures, Tallinn Anthropology MA student Arina Aleksejeva and I found individualistic narratives of resilience and plan B-s. Until the start of the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, the latest undoing of the industrial way of life encouraged workers to try other professions and locations, some of which they were more satisfied with than their mining jobs.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper introduces some preliminary findings from my PhD research into labour and logistics in the Fens of Eastern England. I examine this rural landscape as a particular case of modernist ruin and explore the role labour agencies play in contemporary insecurity.

Paper long abstract:

The Fens of Eastern England are a flat, historic marshland, marked by centuries of disputes over drainage, enclosure, and struggles over the ‘commons’. The demise of the modernist project looms large in this rural landscape, with a divergent historical trajectory to the neighbouring (post-)industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. This is an agricultural region where work has long been organised through kinship networks and ‘gangs’. As such, the post-modernist story of ‘left behind places’ – of a post-war social democratic settlement and subsequent decline – makes even less sense here. Recent scholarly interest has centred on migration from Eastern Europe and overwhelming support for ‘Brexit’, notably in the town of Boston.

This paper introduces some preliminary findings from my PhD research, which re-centres the place of labour in debates over the area, examining it as a ‘logistical hinterland’ and exploring figurations of labour at food factories and logistics parks. I explore how the changing political economy of the capitalist food system has reshaped production, circulation, and re-production relations. The growth of convenience food manufacturing, increased reliance on imports, and the availability of cheap land for logistics sites and retirement housing has created a new constellation of labour relations. I show how the persistence of factory work in unexpected places troubles accounts of ‘post-industrial’ work and point to the importance of a spatial understanding of late versions of capitalist extraction. Finally, I explore what the prevalence of ‘labour agencies’ tell us about contemporary labour (in)security, and ruptures and continuities in labour reproduction.

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Paper short abstract:

In this paper I trace a genealogy of the current spaces of containment, resistance and flight involving migrant workers in Italy's agro-industrial enclaves. Present-day encampments result from the sedimentation of centuries-old processes that have made use (or wished to) of several dispositifs.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will trace a genealogy of the current forms of containment, resistance and flight involving migrant workers in Italy's agro-industrial enclaves. If mainstream representations tend to either confine these workers and the encampments they inhabit into a timeless present, or to summarily compare their conditions to those of 19th-century Italian farm workers, more complex genealogies yield different insights. The encampments of the present day, and workers’ conditions more generally, are, in fact, the result of the sedimentation of centuries-old processes of primitive accumulation and labour disciplining that have made use (or wished to) of several dispositifs, from penal to settler colonies and labour camps, and the concomitant symbolic constructions that sustained them, which were founded on racist anthropologies. The accumulated failures of such projects, and their unintended consequences as much as (or more than) their successes, have led to processes of ruination in whose wake new forms of discipline, extraction and containment have nested. At the same time, the stubborn resistance to such policies of containment and extraction equally recurs across the contemporary period, through an excess that finds in various slum-like emergencies its persistent matrix.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the expansion of the salmon industry in Chilean Patagonia affects spaces, communities, and individual bodies, and how local divers persist under pressure from salmon farm advocates, the Chilean government, the sea, and the environment.

Paper long abstract:

Currently, Patagonia is highly valued as an area of pristine nature and unique biodiversity. However, powerful stakeholders dispute this territory in order to exploit its natural resources. One example is the salmon industry, which has expanded in Patagonia at an accelerated rate over the past three decades. This development has been facilitated by the Chilean state through pro-market laws and low environmental regulation, on the one hand, and Patagonia's large size and isolation, on the other. Indigenous and Chilean communities in Patagonia, as well as members of the scientific community, have denounced the social and environmental consequences of the salmon industry on local life. My paper follows the case of salmon farm divers in Los Lagos, northern Patagonia. The divers take care of the fish and maintain the cages that compose the farms. Diving several times a day and exceeding the recommended limits by international standards, the divers are exposed to high risk of accidents and in many cases their bodies suffer irreversible changes. The salmon industry in Patagonia illustrates some of the most dramatic contradictions of the expansion of capitalism. In this paper, I explore how the processes of ruination of the salmon industry permeate spaces, communities, and individual bodies, and how local organizations persist under pressure - from salmon farm advocates, the environment, and the Chilean government - to maintain and improve their way of life.