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- Convenors:
-
Armaan Alkazi
(Univeristy of Edinburgh)
Shruti Iyer (University of Cambridge)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores the ways in which the relationship between labour and ill-health is understood, politicised, and contested. In particular, the conceptual vocabularies that activists, workers, and patients draw on to articulate their experience of illness and demand recognition for it
Long Abstract
This panel explores the ways in which the relationship between labour and ill-health is understood, politicised, and contested in the contemporary moment. In particular, we are interested in the emergent conceptual vocabularies and categories that activists, workers, and patients draw on to articulate their experience of illness and demand recognition for it. The emergence of the field of ‘occupational health’ and ‘industrial hygiene’ in the twentieth century sought to describe the relationship between work and ill-health and regulate it, albeit to a limited extent. However, today, social movements and trade unions have begun to mobilise different discourses to articulate the relationship between labour and health, turning to environmentalism and human rights to frame the problem of unsafe working conditions and demand redress for them. In both cases, movements rely on forms of medical, scientific, and legal expertise to develop evidence and to legitimise their claims against the state or their employers. What are the possibilities and pitfalls of these appeals to different institutions, discourses, forms of expertise, and political strategies? Are there other emic and etic categories to describe illness as it relates to labour, outside of bureaucratic imaginaries, that are emerging in different contexts? How might these relate to our contemporary moment of polarisation and political change? We invite critical examinations, across diverse ethnographic contexts, of how social movements are engaging with the question of health and labour, the conceptual vocabularies that they rely on, and the strategies that they deploy to politicise the question of illness among workers.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines health-induced migration among informal workers in Jharkhand, showing how chronic labour-related illness compels mobility while remaining unrecognised within occupational health and labour policy frameworks.
Paper long abstract
This paper centres on health-induced migration as a key analytic for understanding the relationship between labour and ill-health in rural India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and participatory rural appraisal (PRA) in Jharkhand, it examines how chronic pain, bodily exhaustion, and declining work capacity compel workers to move across rural–urban and inter-state circuits. Migration here is not merely an economic strategy but an embodied response to illness produced through prolonged engagement with informal, physically demanding, and unregulated labour. Workers often describe migration through experiential idioms such as “the body no longer obeys,” “work has eaten the body,” or “illness pushed us out of the village.” These narratives frame illness as a rupture in everyday labouring life, where the inability to continue working locally necessitates movement in search of treatment, rest, or less strenuous work. Yet institutional frameworks, such as occupational health regimes, labour policy, and migration governance, rarely recognise illness as a driver of mobility. Instead, migration is bureaucratically rendered voluntary, while work-related illness remains individualised and depoliticised. The paper argues that health-induced migration makes labour-related suffering visible while simultaneously obscuring its structural causes. Bodily breakdown becomes legible through movement, but the conditions producing illness in the form of precarious work, caste-based labour segmentation, and absent occupational health protections remain politically illegible. By foregrounding workers’ emic vocabularies of illness and mobility, this paper challenges economic framings of migration and narrow biomedical accounts of labour-related health, contributing to anthropological debates on labour, illness, and recognition in polarised contexts.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how Brazilian startup workers have appropriated the term burnout as a key vocabulary to articulate experiences of psychological suffering related to work.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how Brazilian startup workers have appropriated the term burnout as a key vocabulary to articulate experiences of psychological suffering related to work. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Brazilian startup ecosystem between 2020 and 2024, it analyses burnout not simply as a clinical diagnosis or an individual mental health issue, but as an emic category through which workers make sense of exhaustion, overwork, and emotional distress in highly competitive and performance-oriented environments. I argue that burnout functions as a mediating concept between labour, health, and responsibility. For workers, it provides a socially recognised language to legitimise suffering that might otherwise be interpreted as personal failure or lack of resilience. At the same time, burnout circulates within corporate and managerial discourses that frame ill-health as an individual risk to be managed through self-care, therapy, or performance recovery programs, rather than as a structural consequence of work organisation. The paper situates burnout within broader transformations in the organisation of labour in the technology sector, characterised by flexible work arrangements, continuous performance evaluation, and intensified productivity under venture capital logics. While burnout enables workers to name and communicate distress, it rarely translates into collective mobilisation or demands for structural change. The paper thus explores the political ambivalence of burnout as a contemporary vocabulary of work-related ill-health.
Paper short abstract
This paper investigates the concept of kamzori (weakness) and its relationship to debilitating and physically exhausting work. It traces how systems of care, run both by public healthcare and NGO adjuncts, respond to these 'complaints' by street populations in Delhi, India.
Paper long abstract
This paper investigates the concept of kamzori (weakness) and its relationship to debilitating and physically exhausting work. It traces how systems of care, run both by public healthcare and NGO adjuncts, respond to these 'complaints' by street populations in Delhi, India.
Anthropological work in the past decade has explored the polyvalence of ‘kamzori’ (Saxena 2023, Verma 2021), tracing its relationship to political oppression, gendered labour, and shifting political economies. The ubiquity of the complaint leads to varied responses, even within the same institution, with reflections on loneliness and masculinity, as well as ‘treatments’ of protein powder and multi vitamins, and sometimes outright dismissal. Although responses vary, physically demanding work remains a central causative factor in all such complaints. The politicization of kamzori is latent, occasionally finding mention when healthcare workers reflect on their days attending to and caring for patients.
The epidemic of TB on the street, more recognizable then kamzori, but still underacknowledged, remains the focus of activists. TB, recognised as an important public health problem, with its apparatus of diagnostics, treatments and statistics, takes centre-stage. Yet the biomedical response to TB keeps failing, with patients leaving before their 6 month treatment courses are complete in search of work or simply not starting treatment because they have the opportunity to work. What would a politics and a system of care that places kamzori as a diagnosis, rather than a symptom, of forms of dangerous labour?
Paper short abstract
Recent years have seen growing challenges to political economies of racialised depletion in London’s commercial cleaning sector. Contrasting scientific and legal concepts with cleaners’ own knowledges, this paper asks how movements (might) navigate the epistemic politics involved in these fights.
Paper long abstract
In a competitive and labour-intensive industry, the profitability of outsourced cleaning services in London relies on a political economy of racialised depletion. An ensemble of political, economic and social processes and practices over-expose migrant workers to preventable occupational health risks, while under-protecting them in case of injury or illness.
Propelled by the Covid-19 pandemic, recent years have seen growing challenges to this political economy of racialised depletion. Migrant commercial cleaners have taken their fights for H&S and sick pay rights to bosses, judges and politicians. Like those before them, these representational struggles necessarily make strategic use of scientific and legal knowledges and vocabularies that are closely entangled with the patriarchal, colonialist and social democratic genealogies of the British ‘health and welfare state’. Occupational health science knowledge of commercial cleaning, for example, is limited by a ‘regime of perceptibility’ (Murphy 2006) constructed around the economic productivity of the white, male, able-bodied worker-citizen.
Yet in the descriptions, discussions and analyses shared during my research in 2021-2023, migrant commercial cleaners espoused ways of knowing, imagining and enacting health, sickness and the body that are not reducible to – and furthermore often challenge – scientific and legal concepts and logics, and the political economies that they help to sustain. In this paper, I contrast these two forms of knowledge and ask how movements (might) navigate between them in pursuit of an emancipatory and intersectional politics of health and healing.
Paper short abstract
This presentation examines workers’ health and safety as a site of class struggle through HESA Labour Watch–Turkey, showing how worker-led OHS organizing challenges state- and employer-centered frameworks through documentation and collective action.
Paper long abstract
This presentation approaches occupational health and safety (OHS) as a contested field of class struggle through the experience of HESA Labour Watch–Turkey, a worker-led and autonomous labor initiative. Rather than treating OHS as a technical or regulatory issue, the paper examines how workers’ health and safety become political terrain shaped by power relations between labor, capital, and the state.
Founded in 2011 by workers and their families, HESA Labour Watch emerged in response to the structural failure of state- and employer-centered OHS frameworks in Turkey. Operating independently from official institutions, the movement has developed alternative practices based on workers’ knowledge, collective monitoring, and public accountability. Through the documentation of workplace deaths, public statements, collective actions, and engagement with broader labor struggles, HESA Labour Watch challenges dominant approaches that depoliticize occupational accidents and safety violations.
Drawing on a political-economic perspective, the presentation analyzes how worker-led OHS organizing confronts neoliberal labor regimes and authoritarian governance. It argues that HESA Labour Watch represents not only a response to unsafe working conditions, but also a broader critique of production relations that systematically endanger workers’ lives. In this sense, OHS emerges as a site where class conflict is articulated through struggles over visibility, responsibility, and the right to life.
Methodologically, the study relies on archival materials, press records, and organizational documents. By situating HESA Labour Watch within wider labor struggles, the presentation highlights the political significance of grassroots OHS activism and contributes to discussions on worker autonomy and alternative forms of labor organizing in Turkey.
Paper short abstract
I draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a sex workers' union in London to articulate their activism for workers' rights and occupational safety, as a means to reframe illness and injury as effects of stigmatised labour and carceral policing regimes rather than epidemiological risk.
Paper long abstract
Sex work and sex workers are routinely produced within medical and legal regimes as objects of epidemiological risk, the precarious and stigmatising nature of whose labours are appropriated to mobilise discourses of health that consolidate disease as bodily and moral harm, rather than as workers whose labour absorbs specific forms of illness, injury, and bodily exhaustion. Anxieties about population health, in these discourses, reproduce sex workers as requiring containment and policing, or as responsibilised subjects of development tasked with managing risk through compliance with HIV prevention, reproductive health, and hygiene protocols. Regulatory appeals to hygiene and safety in public health therefore function as techniques of governmentality through which sexuality is rendered legible, governable, and punishable under the guise of health protection.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a sex workers’ union in London, this paper examines how sex workers advocate for occupational safety by drawing attention to the forms of bodily harm produced through surveillancing and policing practices. Union workers politicise the connections between occupational safety and sex work, by showing how bureaucratic and governmental anxieties about sexual health belie a larger class and gender ideology invested with the management of working-class bodies through the sanitisation of the public sphere. The paper shows how sex workers' unions attempt to advance alternate ideas of health and workers' autonomy, that draw not from individualised, securitised, and epidemiological notions of health, but remain rooted in ideals of freedom from coercion, carceral regulation, and medicalised surveillance.
Paper short abstract
This research explores how trade unions and farmworkers in Spain and Germany address heat-related health risks amid rising global temperatures and labour precarity. It examines workers' strategies for protection and control over their bodies and work in the context of ecological breakdown.
Paper long abstract
Exposure to high temperatures at work combined with little control over working conditions has long made workers vulnerable to heat-related injury and premature death. With rapidly rising global temperatures due to the climate crisis combined with the precarity of labour markets in the post-neoliberal era, heat poses an increasingly widespread and dangerous health risk across sectors worldwide. This research investigates how trade unions in Europe conceptualise the interconnected issues of ecology, health, and labour, and how they organize against heat stress and related health issues. Focusing on the agricultural sector - one of the most exposed to climate-related heat risks - the study draws on original empirical data gathered through ongoing participatory research with unionized farmworkers in Spain and Germany. It examines how workers in these contrasting contexts make demands and develop strategies for protection from heat-related health risks from the state and employers, and why. Preliminary findings reveal diverse strategies employed by workers. For example, migrant farmworkers in Andalusia are attempting to politicise their rights to take breaks at work, challenging both immediate health hazards and broader ecological and economic dynamics. Overall, this research explores how heat exposes, heightens and shapes conflicts around workers’ control over their time and bodies amid ecological breakdown. It also offers reflections on the potential and limitations of different contextual strategies for labour organisation and resistance in the climate crisis.