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- Convenors:
-
Armaan Alkazi
(Univeristy of Edinburgh)
Shruti Iyer (University of Cambridge)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Location:
- Politicum, 136
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
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 1 Friday 24 July, 2026, -Paper 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 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
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.