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.

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