Paper short abstract

This paper examines the intricacies of profit margins in value chains starting at gold mining sites in Sudan, particularly how patterns of revenue distribution are shaped by the ambivalent access to extractive technologies, from hand-held hammer and chisel to the state-owned refinery.

Paper long abstract

Gold mining in Sudan transformed from a niche activity to a vital part of the population's economy in just 25 years. Initially driven by economic crises, global price shifts, and access to previously unavailable extractive technologies, this development has now become closely linked with the war economy, serving not only as one of the few viable income sources but also as a key element in extractivist geopolitics that sustains warfare. At the centre of the value chains connecting gold mining sites in the country with global markets via Dubai is a simple technological difference: the extractive efficiency of mercury versus cyanide, with the former recovering about 30% of gold from ore and the latter about 90%. This 60% gap underpins the exploitative tailings business, where small-scale miners' waste is cheaply acquired by larger producers, many of whom are connected to armed groups. Rather than a straightforward artisanal-industrial divide, mining sites represent arenas of technological heterogeneity, where a child crushing stones with a hammer may work alongside ball mills and carbon-in-column facilities. The resulting dependencies and profit margins follow familiar stratifications, yet detailed revenue distributions reveal a less obvious role for manual labour within survival economies and the logistics linking these activities to the expanding circuits of global gold trade. We argue that this particular status of manual labour reflects the economic rationales maintaining it, while also highlighting its fundamental importance for current and future resource governance, both locally and globally.

Paper short abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with women domestic workers in Delhi to examine domestic labour as contemporary manual work. It argues that capitalism relies not only on bodily exhaustion but on the management of workers’ visible appearance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines women’s paid domestic work in Delhi as a category of manual labour. Challenging accounts that frame manual labour as residual to technologically mediated futures of work, it argues that domestic labour remains constitutive of contemporary capitalism through the management, exhaustion, and valuation of working bodies. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi’s peripheral settlements and middle-class neighbourhoods, the paper centres women’s understandings of "mehnat" as hard, repetitive labour as both bodily effort and cumulative bodily depletion.

At the same time, domestic workers are required to manage how their labouring bodies appear. Employers’ diffuse expectations that workers be “clean” and “presentable” translate into everyday practices of appearance work. These practices are shaped by spatial and social proximities between workers’ homes and employers’ homes, producing distinct regimes of bodily control and visibility across neighbourhoods.

By bringing together analyses of bodily wear, appearance, and value, the paper recentres manual labour as neither past nor disappearing, but as an embodied process through which respectability and inequality are continuously produced.

Paper short abstract

Drawing onlfieldwork in southern Spain, in one of Europe’s most important berry production areas, I discuss how recentering manual labour and its physicality can open up new possibilities for theorising agricultural labour processes and their relationship with sustainable agricultural policy.

Paper long abstract

This paper addresses the role of manual labour in analysing and theorising contemporary agricultural production. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the province of Huelva (Spain), which has been one of Europe’s most important berry production areas for several decades, I discuss how recentering manual labour and its physicality can open up new possibilities for theorising agricultural labour processes and their relation to sustainable agricultural policy. I argue that the contemporary analysis, theorising and policy planning of sustainable agriculture overwhelmingly ignore the role that control over manual labour plays in reproducing extractive forms of agriculture. The sidelining of manual labour has had lasting consequences, and, as the case of Huelva shows, it has also led to a deadlock in resolving agriculture-conservation conflicts.

Paper short abstract

Through ethnography in the Austrian high-tech greenhouse sector, I examine how AgTech aspires to automate agriculture yet remains dependent on manual plant care. I argue that this contradiction produces “techno-racial fixes” that intertwine migrant labor recruitment with imagined robotic futures.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I present a chapter from my dissertation based on engaged ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2026) in Austria’s greenhouse agriculture sector. The chapter examines how the future of manual agricultural labor is being re-organized, as employers confront climate intensification and labor shortages. But despite grand promises, the indeterminacy of plant biology and growth rhythms has thus far prevented AgTech actors from fully automating harvesting and plant-care tasks. Manual labor thus remains indispensable. The chapter therefore asks what meanings and futures are being attached to this physicality, and the resulting racialized and embodied dimenions. In particular, I analyze how greenhouse companies increasingly rely on a short-term solution through a new migration chain in which Nepali workers are recruited as the primary manual workforce. Agricultural actors routinely describe these workers as more “heat-resistant" and “enduring", revealing shifting hierarchies of bodily value. Alongside this racial substitution, a mid- to long-term solution is envisioned around full automation. Growers and AgTech consultants describe harvest robots as inevitable, though they oscillate between certainty and skepticism about when such technologies will actually arrive.

Taken together, I think through how these two concurrent tendencies structure contemporary AgTech: a techno-fix, which imagines automation as the future horizon, and a racial fix, which sustains manual labour in the present. Rather than treating these tendencies as isolated responses, I conceptualize their coupling as "techno-racial fixes" - mechanisms through which AgTech is shaped by the contradiction between the aspiration to move beyond the physicality of agricultural labor, and its ongoing necessity.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the transnational geographies of manual labour produced through Pacific Islander temporary labour migration schemes in Australia. These reflect the particularities of contemporary capitalism, reanimate colonial pasts, and yield contradictory (de)valuations of physical work.

Paper long abstract

Since 2018, an expansion of temporary labour migration schemes has seen increasing numbers of Pacific Islanders travelling to Australia to work under restrictive, time-limited visas. The work they do is nominally-unskilled work for which industry struggles to recruit sufficient local labour. It is also overwhelmingly manual, including fruit-picking, aged care work, and meat-processing. As guestwork schemes reconfigure patterns of Pacific mobility and sociality, and of Australia-Pacific relations, they also produce new transnational spatial distributions of labour. These reflect the particularities of contemporary capitalism, while also reanimating colonial pasts and hierarchies. Here, the Pacific is figured as a plentiful source of manual workers, and Pacific bodies figured as well-suited to gruelling physicality. Contemporary technologies of labour and migration governance combine with these racialised tropes to provide a ‘spatial fix’ for Australian industry, making labour available when needed while ensuring that workers return to their home countries, and that the reproductive labour of sustaining this manual workforce is contained within the Pacific itself. As labour and migration regimes fuse with the scheme’s developmentalist framing, meanwhile, manual labour itself becomes subject to shifting and sometimes-contradictory forms of (de)valuation. As ‘low-skilled’ and low-paid labour it is economically devalued, but simultaneously held out to workers for its potential to transform lives, families, and communities. Farmers, meanwhile, wield ambivalent discourses of ‘work ethic’ that both valorise manual labour and reveal anxieties about their dependence on it.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines voluntary shifts from office work to gastronomy and food production in Poland, showing how manual labour creates meaning and imagined futures, while revealing class tensions over access to them.

Paper long abstract

As stated in the panel abstract, contemporary debates on the future of work often emphasise digitalisation and automation, while manual and craft-based labour is framed as residual or nostalgic. This paper explores a contrasting trajectory: voluntary career shifts from office-based work to gastronomy and food production, where making tangible products becomes central.

Drawing on qualitative research in Poland, I examine how participants narrate such transitions and articulate the value of manual labour. I focus on the material, temporal, and relational qualities of work with food: the tangibility and immediacy of outcomes, and interactions that produce recognition and affective feedback. These accounts reveal a paradox: physical effort is often downplayed, while the visibility and resonance of results are foregrounded.

By treating these practices as forms of productive engagement combining creativity, skill, and affective labour, the paper shows how manual work can become a site of meaning-making, self-expression, and connection, aligning with the affective-moral infrastructure of late capitalism rather than returning to pre-industrial modes. While my previous studies drew on Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance (Bachórz 2023), the argument remains open to alternative frameworks and further empirical material, contributing to broader debates on the value and potential of manual labour.

At the same time, the paper highlights tensions embedded in these hopeful, aspirational visions of manual labour: it is transformed, aestheticized, and partially disembodied, which may align with middle-class projects of self-realisation while marginalizing working-class experiences. The broadest question, then, is who has access to these hopeful ‘futures,’ and under what conditions.

Paper short abstract

In Istrian farm restaurants cooks create value by producing foods guests recognise as traditional and homemade by detecting the manual labour within them. They must manage the tensions between these desired authenticities and the realities of business demands, keeping certain forms of labour hidden.

Paper long abstract

Since the break-up of Yugoslavia, life in Croatian Istria, as elsewhere, has changed dramatically. While some have embraced “fast” food, “street food” and other novelties now available, there remains mistrust in imported and new foods and a desire, especially among urban professionals, to enjoy “traditional”, “homemade” “Istrian” food when possible. Farm restaurants (agroturizmi) provide this, operating in a regime of value structured by a nostalgic past-oriented temporal frame. Whilst so much else changes, agroturizmi are expected to practise and perform the past.

Agroturizmi cooks create cultural and economic value by producing food their guests recognise as traditional and homemade, such as hand-made pasta, wood-fired oven-baked bread and slow-cooked stews—all time- and labour-intensive. Women, especially, must present as domestic and traditional cooks, with their manual labour detectable in the food. In practice, however, cooks must manage disjunctures between these desired authenticities and the realities of running a restaurant business.

This paper, based on fieldwork 2017-2019, examines how cooks do this by carefully combining “traditional” and “modern” foods, home-produced and bought ingredients, and laborious and time-saving cooking methods, keeping certain technologies and forms of labour hidden. I argue that whilst offering such hospitality affords some opportunities to supplement poor agricultural returns and challenge rural stereotypes, it requires (self-)exploitation of family labour and amplifies traditional gendering of food work. The paper contributes an analysis of how the temporal demands of “traditional” and “homemade” food values structure labour in a restaurant setting, and are themselves modified by the actual temporalities of this labour.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines shifts in handmade tortilla production from domestic to commercial spaces in Chiapas Mexico. In a social reproduction lens, I explore how demand for natural foods reconfigures women's labour as domestic tasks move to the market, both reproducing and eroding patriarchal categories

Paper long abstract

This paper examines reconfigurations of women's work in the elaboration of handmade tortillas in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Since the 2000s, urban demand has led to a resurgence of handmade tortillas, semiotically associated with domesticity, rurality, authenticity, and naturalness. Since the colonial period, tortillas' availability as a commercial product outside the household was largely limited to domestic service in wealthier households, a legacy of colonial labour structures binding marginalized workers (primarily rural indigenised women) to elite families (primarily white-mestizo). During the twentieth century, some domestic workers turned to selling tortillas in urban markets, making this handmade product more widely available as a commercial commodity. Since the 1970s, urban demographic and social transformations, coupled with a widespread sense of ecological crisis linked to industrial products such as machine-made tortillas, have led to a revalorisation of "natural" foods. Drawing on 18 months of ethnography within market spaces and households, I mobilise a social reproduction framework to explore how this valuation of "handmade" and "natural" tortillas reconfigures the labour and livelihoods of the women involved in their elaboration.

I trace how domestic food work transforms through various entrepreneurial activities, and how these extensions within and beyond the household reproduce but also erode patriarchal gender categories. How does the valuation of handmade foods as "natural" reconfigure the boundaries of interpenetration between reproductive and productive labour? What transformations does the outsourcing of previously domestic tasks produce, in response to growing demand for natural foods, as their elaboration extends from kinship relations to market relations?

Paper short abstract

Manicure work in Athens’ expanding nail industry, though routinely undervalued as low-status, recasts habitual manual labour as skilled practice, artistic creativity and entrepreneurial aspiration. The hand, as both agent and object of labour, produces value, demands care and resists disposability.

Paper long abstract

Three occupations —waiters and waitresses, delivery workers, and nail technicians— are routinely invoked in public discourse to lament the perceived erosion of ‘highly skilled’ work and the simultaneous rise of low-capital, service-oriented, manual labour in contemporary Greece. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research in Athens, this paper uses manicure work as an entry point to examine the meanings, values, and power relations of manual labour under contemporary capitalism. Relying almost entirely on the skilled labour of the hand, requiring little formal training and minimal start-up capital, and often performed informally, manicure work occupies a space of both constraint and opportunity: it carries a low-status reputation while offering the promise of autonomy and a steady —even if modest— income. At the same time, manicure work points to a revalorisation of manual labour. In Athens' rapidly expanding and diversifying ‘nail industry,’ mundane tasks are increasingly reframed through idioms of expertise, artistic creativity, and entrepreneurial aspiration. In this process, manicure work remains firmly embedded within the domain of manual labour while simultaneously complicating it, mobilising aesthetic authority, claims to professionalism, and narratives of self-making to negotiate —or even escape— its association with disposable work. Within this constellation, the hand —as both agent and object of labour— demands care even as it produces value.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on the re-emergence of blacksmithing in France, this paper analyses how manual labour becomes a contested ideological and economic issue. Far from being residual, it operates within the interstices of capitalism and serves as a site for competing projections of the futures of work.

Paper long abstract

The predicted disappearance of French blacksmithing did not occur. After a century of decline, it has recently re-emerged under the impetus of a new generation of artisans, already shaped by contrasting ideological appropriations. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, two scenes can be observed. On the first, the figure of the blacksmith is reappropriated by nationalist movements that recast it as a symbol of rootedness, tradition, and strength. Fascination with weapons and the exaltation of Viking imaginaries, detached from their historical contexts, contribute to an “invention of tradition,” in which appeals to the past serve to legitimise contemporary political identities through new mythologies.

On the second scene, young collectives of artisans and ecological movements reframe manual labour within logics of emancipation and cooperation, often articulated through a critique of industrial capitalism. Their attempts to redefine work around autonomy, skill transmission, and ownership of the means of production resonate with a longer history of artisans and small producers who, from the French Revolution to the labour movement, played an active role in political struggles. Between these two scenes, French blacksmithing is being recomposed.

“It is true that when capitalism fares poorly, craftsmanship fares better” (Zarca, 1985). While the futures of work are often imagined through a technological teleology that relegates manual labour to the past, this paper proposes a different perspective by analysing manual labour as an interstitial form of contemporary capitalism. From this standpoint, manual work redefines its material conditions of existence by investing specific economic and symbolic niches.