Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how concepts of 'safety' circulate and become contested. Ethnography of occupational health and safety reveals a mismatch between technocratic, procedural constructions of safety in global policy and local Bangladeshi interpretations that are adversarial, economic, and embodied.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the construction and circulation of a concept of 'safety,' from policymakers in Europe to the shop floors of garment factories in Bangladesh. After the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in Dhaka (which resulted in the loss of more than 1,000 lives and injuries to thousands more), regimes of health and safety governance in the global garment industry have become narrowly focused on issues of building and equipment safety to the exclusion of more wide-ranging, embodied, and politically sensitive discussions of worker health. With a multi-sited ethnographic approach that traces the construction of occupational safety policy among European stakeholders (ILO in Geneva, Secretariat of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Amsterdam, multinational corporations headquartered in Europe, WHO, etc.) to its application in Bangladeshi factories, my research shows how global discourses and practices of worker 'safety' reflect a technocratic impulse to inspect, audit, repair, and recompense that are at odds with local Bangladeshi interpretations of 'safety' that are political, adversarial, economic, and embodied. My research contributes to our understanding of 'safety' as a biomedical concept by tracing its twin relationship to economic formulations of risk, and legal conceptions of liability within a local ethnographic context that contests these notions at every turn.