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- Convenors:
-
Juliane Müller
(University of Barcelona)
Alioscia Castronovo (Università di Padova University of Padua)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel looks for ethnographic presentations that reflect a Popular Economy perspective. Do breaches and conflicts in popular economies help us understand political polarization or, to the contrary, can our findings on socioeconomic life be a contribution to a less polarized and unequal world?
Long Abstract
The research field of Popular Economies invites us to leave aside theoretical oppositions such as formal/informal economy, production/reproduction, community/market. Since its initial use in Latin American social sciences, the term has meant questioning the attributes of the ‘informal economy’ and the supposed single path to economic modernity. Popular economies are neither marginal nor ‘disordered’ economies, but constituted by practices, social networks, infrastructures and institutions that combine production, distribution and consumption of goods and services essential to “the social reproduction of large majorities” (Cielo, Gago and Tassi 2023: 17; Müller 2024).
The Marxist feminist tradition have emphasized the productive value of care and household work, everyday tasks that not only facilitate the reproduction of labor, but also the reproduction of life in a broader sense. In the daily lives of traders and vendors, for example, interpersonal care and work to earn a living intersect, coexisting in both domestic and public spaces. Moreover, social reproduction in popular economies is fully intertwined with productive labor, reconfiguring social struggles and processes of subjectivation (Castronovo 2019), enabling critical debates on contemporary capitalist transformations and racial, gender and class hierarchies.
This panel invites presentations combining ethnographic insights with reflections on the epistemological and political consequences of a Popular Economy framework. Do economic breaches and conflicts in popular economies help us understand political polarization or, to the contrary, can an understanding of socioeconomic life on the ground be a contribution to a less polarized and unequal world?
Accepted papers
Session 2Paper short abstract
I analyze two Colombian idioms: rebusque, an economic idiom and practice the drive to find opportunities to survive and thrive even beyond state-sanctioned means, and berraquera, a demeanor and future-oriented attitude shaped by liberal and Catholic values, shaped by and against the state.
Paper long abstract
What can popular economic practices tell us about people’s relationship with states? What can they illuminate about possible futures?
This paper analyzes two Colombian idioms. Rebusque refers to economic practices and the drive to find opportunities to survive and thrive, even through means not sanctioned by the state (González, 2008). Berraquera encompasses a demeanor, an attitude, and a future-oriented outlook (DeMaria et al., 2023) shaped by liberal and Catholic values, sometimes aligned with the state and sometimes opposed to it.
I argue that rebusque materializes core ideas of berraquera through economic action. People use it to craft their own version of development, often viewing the state as a hindrance or obstacle to be overcome or circumvented. A central critique is that the state has fallen from divine favor and now blocks people’s economic pursuits, preventing them from thriving. Rebusque becomes both a critique of the state and the enactment of that critique.
The analysis draws on an accidented ethnography (Günel & Watanabe, 2024) conducted during the 2020–2021 pandemic in Colombia and extended through fieldwork up to 2025. I examine participants’ economic practices and the narratives and ideas embedded in them.
I begin by outlining the concepts of rebusque and berraquera and their relationship, examining their moral dimensions, Catholic influences, liberal edges, and potential histories. I then analyze recent shifts affecting rebusque, including state discourses on the digital and platform economy and the ways people adapt or resist these narratives. I conclude by considering the futures these transformations make imaginable.
Paper short abstract
Comparing Chinese and Romanian diasporas in Italy, this paper shows how popular economies sustain livelihoods through care, kinship, and relational finance. Rather than informality, these practices act as economic infrastructure, shaping governance, conflict, and coexistence under uncertainty.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on long-term ethnographic research among Wenzhou-origin Chinese entrepreneurs and workers in Prato’s fast-fashion districts, and comparative fieldwork with Romanian immigrants in Tuscany (care, construction, transport), this paper traces the everyday infrastructures through which economic life is made durable under conditions of uncertainty. In Prato, Chinese firms are sustained through dense assemblages of family labour, childcare and eldercare, transnational credit, rotating saving and lending practices, and enclave trade-credit chains. These arrangements function as economic infrastructure: they coordinate liquidity, labour, and goods while enabling navigation of labour inspections, regulatory pressure, and racialised suspicion.
By contrast, Romanian popular economies are largely organised through remittances, interest-free kin loans, and household-centred moral obligations that stabilise multi-sited families. Here, care work and social reproduction - often feminised and performed under precarious conditions - absorb risk and secure everyday provisioning, while entrepreneurial activity frequently remains an extension of household strategies rather than consolidating into collective or firm-level productive infrastructures.
Rather than indexing different “stages” of modernity, these cases reveal distinct configurations of popular economies shaped by migration regimes, moral economies, and institutional contexts. Conceptually, the paper returns to the notion of people-as-infrastructure (Simone 2021), showing how care, obligation, and relational finance generate their own modes of coordination, subjectivation, and conflict management. By locating political polarisation in concrete sites of friction such as regulation, neighbourhood tensions, and moral hierarchies of “honest work” and “illegality”, the paper argues that ethnographic attention to socioeconomic life can unsettle polarised narratives about migration, informality, and economic conflict in provincial contemporary Europe.
Paper short abstract
This paper contrasts two circuits of popular economies in the peripheries of Brazil's metropolitan areas. While one operates through the political autonomism of the poor and collective resistance, a rising digital circuit promotes neoliberal adherence and individual asceticism.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on the panel’s inquiry into polarization, this paper analyzes two antagonistic circuits currently disputing the meaning of popular economies in Brazil. The first, grounded in my previous ethnography of street vendors, operates through a logic of "autonomism of the poor". Here, informality functions as a refusal of traditional wage labor and a mechanism for collective political friction, where workers occupy urban space to demand rights and permanence.
Conversely, a second circuit is rapidly gaining ground, fueled by digital platforms. Analyzing the discourse of "financial influencers" from São Paulo’s peripheries, I identify a rising subjectivity of "neoliberal adherence". This circuit reframes survival strategies not as resistance, but as transitional entrepreneurship. It promotes a radical "asceticism of the hustle"—characterized by extreme frugality, the rejection of social ties, and the depoliticization of poverty—aimed at individual accumulation and an eventual exodus from the territory.
By contrasting the "political autonomy" of the street with the "neoliberal asceticism" of the screen, I argue that the popular economy is gaining further complexity and heterogeneity, with important political implications. In the two poles that I analyze, one circuit seeks to politicize the territory and another seeks to capitalize on the self. The urban political implications are manifold, from urban social movements to electoral political dynamics.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyses the post-pandemic hardening of the Ceuta–Morocco border through everyday economic practices. It shows how border closure reshaped circulation and survival in northern Morocco, making sovereignty visible as a lived and contested process.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the post-pandemic hardening of the Ceuta–Morocco border from the Moroccan side, focusing on how border closure reshaped everyday economic practices and survival strategies in northern Morocco. For decades, daily crossings sustained dense circuits of trade and mobility that structured livelihoods in border towns. The sudden interruption of this circulation disrupted income, coordination, and locally established ways of managing authority and constraint.
Based on ethnographic observation, interviews with traders and residents, and analysis of policy documents as social artefacts, the paper traces how border hardening reorganised everyday practices in Tetouan and Fnideq. Rather than relying on a formal versus informal distinction, the analysis foregrounds how economic life is practically organised under conditions of restricted mobility. These practices appear as adaptive systems that combine coordination, negotiation, and improvisation.
As control was recentralised through surveillance, regulated crossings, and security infrastructures, access to movement and opportunity became increasingly uneven. Border governance produced new frictions and dependencies, intensifying social differentiation within local communities. In response, actors recalibrated routes, networks, and strategies to maintain circulation under altered conditions.
By focusing on the Moroccan side of the Ceuta border, the paper shows how sovereignty becomes tangible through everyday restrictions on movement rather than abstract claims of authority. The analysis contributes to anthropological debates on borders and popular economic life by grounding economic practices in everyday encounters with border governance.
Paper short abstract
Based on fieldwork with migrant delivery workers in Bogotá, this paper examines how platform work is reconfigured from below through workers’ everyday spatio-temporal practices. Using a popular economies framework, it rethinks what counts as platform work and the forms of politics emerging from it.
Paper long abstract
Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with predominantly Venezuelan migrant platform delivery workers in Bogotá, this paper situates platform delivery work within an urban popular economies framework. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at a central gathering place used by workers, which I call El Mall, it foregrounds the everyday practices through which platform work is reconfigured from below. From this perspective, a popular economies framework invites a rethinking of both what counts as platform work and the forms of politics emerging from it.
First, approaching platform labour through a popular economies framework allows workers’ experiences to be understood not only in terms of what this labour regime lacks, but also in affirmative terms ( Cielo, Gago and Tassi, 2023). Platform delivery work thus appears as a generative and expansive site of community and life-making, shaped through practices such as waiting, socializing, resting, collaborating, and sustaining social ties within the interstices of algorithmic time and in quintessentially neoliberal spaces such as shopping malls.
Second, this framework allows a rethinking of what counts as politics. Rather than purely oppositional, workers’ practices reflect a pragmatism oriented toward sustaining life, through which they carve out spaces of autonomy within algorithmically controlled time and space and conditions of heightened neoliberal exploitation (Gago, 2018).
Third, the paper shows how these spatial, temporal, and moral practices blur the boundary between production and reproduction. As labour organization and coordination are deeply entangled with community and care, what counts as work in platform capitalism is expanded and pluralized.
Paper short abstract
Based on an ethnographic research with popular carework and textile workers experimenting collective labor in Suba, Bogotá, this paper aims to explore the challenging processes of politicization of social and labor relationships in popular economies during the first Colombian popular government.
Paper long abstract
The current challenging policrisis can be productively observed form the perspective of popular economies to understand forms of production and reproduction beyond the separations between social, political and economic dimensions of life, focusing on their boundaries and resonances, beyond the logics and category of informality and its political implications. Popular economies are part of complex transnational processes of reconfiguration of forms of labor, historical and contemporary processes of exploitation, extraction, violence and economic development (Gago, 2014; Cielo, Gago, Tassi, 2023). Based on an ethnographic research in Bogotá, Colombia, in dialogue with Latin American experiences and debates, this paper aims to contribute to analyze political implications of popular economies’ frameworks experimenting processes of social organization and the production of infrastructures for collective labor in urban popular territories. Reflecting ethnographically on the dynamics of politicization of social, racialiced and gendered labor/class relationships, in the experience of popular careworkers and textile workers in urban areas of Suba, in Bogotá, this paper aims to explore both processes of politization of productive and reproductive activities, and its reconfiguration, as constitutive dimensions of contemporary forms of popular labor and forms of life. Making popular economies a particularly important space for analyzing processes of subjectivation and for developing a notion of the common as social interaction and mode of production, this paper situates its reflections in the context of the first popular government in Colombia, exploring its challenging disputes on public policies for popular economies that confront neoliberal and far-right discourses in a deep polarized political scenario.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines popular economies in Javier Milei’s Argentina as arenas in which collective futures are negotiated. It shows how practices of making a living shape political formation, revealing both frustration and renewed possibilities for cooperation and hope even in times of crisis.
Paper long abstract
The election of Javier Milei as president of Argentina in 2023—the ‘anarcho-libertarian’ who claimed he would destroy the state from within to free society and the economy—radically changed the country’s political landscape. Taking many by surprise, his rise raised pressing questions about how to imagine the future in a country repeatedly marked by cyclical crises, at a moment when the radical right seems to have displaced the progressive left as the primary vehicle for rebelliousness and popular indignation (Stefanoni 2024). This paper addresses the current conjuncture by examining popular economies as arenas in which collective futures, political identities, and moral claims are actively negotiated. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research with migrant garment workers and members of the Unión de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular (UTEP), it analyses how workers navigate precarious livelihoods in shifting political landscapes, showing that practices of making a living shape processes of political formation. Workers’ everyday struggles generate divergent responses to crisis, ranging from renewed commitments to solidarity and collective action to disillusionment, withdrawal, and political resentment. Ultimately, the paper argues that close attention to everyday practices within popular economies is essential for understanding how frustration and political disengagement can take hold, as well as how hope can be rebuilt and alternative futures imagined through cooperation, experimentation, and mutual care.
Paper short abstract
Based on the ethnographic work I am currently conducting in the southern Colombian Pacific, this paper shares co-constructed analyses with women who reinvent politics through everyday popular economic practices.
Paper long abstract
Colombia has the second largest Afro-descendant population in Latin America, most of which is concentrated along the Pacific Coast, a region characterized both by its important global biodiversity reserves and by high levels of extreme poverty. In this context, Afro-Colombian women engage in organizing processes in response to the multiple forms of violence that affect both their bodies and the territories and communities they inhabit. They do so primarily through strategies, practices, and economic relationships forged in popular everyday life and oriented toward the reproduction of life. Drawing on the ethnographic work I am conducting in the Colombian Pacific, and taking as a central hypothesis that political work is not separate from the activities that recreate life (Vega Solís, 2019), this paper presents co-constructed analyses developed together with women involved in organizing processes that they describe as socio-ecological and economic. These processes challenge binaries such as legal–illegal and formal–informal, thereby problematizing analyses that contribute to the reproduction of polarizing positions within society.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on research with Zapatista communities and solidarity networks in Europe, the paper uses coffee to explore how dichotomies of in/formality and infra/politics take shape in practice. Popular economies are approached as terrains where struggles over legitimacy and value emerge beyond binaries.
Paper long abstract
This paper engages with debates on popular economies by using ethnography as a point of observation to examine analytical oppositions that continue to structure discussions of economic life. Drawing on long-term research on coffee circulation between Zapatista communities and solidarity networks in Europe, it uses coffee to explore how dichotomies of in/formality and infra/politics take shape and are displaced in practice.
Popular economies are approached through the ways economic action acquires legitimacy in concrete situations. Zapatista cooperatives rely on their own authorizations and collective procedures to regulate production and circulation. These devices hold no validity in the eyes of the Mexican state. They nonetheless affect how goods move, how intermediaries operate, and how risks are distributed. Cracks in ordinary distribution expose how formality operates as performance, through negotiation and recognition, always embedded in precarious power relations.
Following these movements allows to question interpretations that frame popular economies primarily in moral terms or through assumptions polarizing silent and overt resistance. The paper suggests approaching popular economies as terrains where concrete practices and political ethics remain entangled without stabilizing into clear binaries. They make visible the socio-political life of coffee, revealing how struggles over value emerge through ordinary transactions that do not consistently speak the language of overt political action. Yet they reorganize economic relations and obligations in ways that matter for social reproduction, through contested forms of legitimacy. Polarizations between the loud and the silent, the rational and the moral, appear as analytical divides that actors themselves do not necessarily draw.