P06a


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Worker's precarity: audio-visual representations of resistance 
Convenors:
Lana Askari (University of Manchester)
Paloma Yáñez Serrano (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
Jose Luis Fajardo-Escoffie (University of Sheffield)
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Format:
Panel Discussion
Start time:
27 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
Session slots:
1

Short Abstract:

This panel will explore workers' resistance by discussing how audio-visual methods and representations seek to communicate their precarious experiences and protests. We welcome current and past reflections on worker's rights and resistances, encouraging feminist and political ecological approaches.

Long Abstract:

How can we understand, analyse and support workers' resistance through audio-visual methods? This panel seeks abstracts that explore the marginalized actors within labour structures, as the active agents of localized intersubjective knowledge, rather than mere resources of a capitalist commodity chain (Haraway, 1988). In the past century worker's rights have been advanced through popular (collective) resistance. However, workers' precarity remains a current issue affected by neoliberal policies and recent COVID-19 regulations as seen in continuing global protests, from factory workers to white collar flex jobs. We are interested in the construction of these resistances through 'sonic images'; "the set of postures, body movements, expressions, gestures" that expose the workers' social and political context through their affective relations, modes of performance and everyday forms of survival (D'Amico, 2015:2). These include localized audio-visual production among workers, which serve to disrupt "comfortable [visual] boundaries and encouraging transgression of rules" (Mitchell 1992: 223), create empathy in shared feelings of social immobility and entrapment, or other acts of resistance or forms collective or collaborative activism. The focus on audio-visual representation questions how existing forms of visualization of localised labour build a ubiquitous form of knowledge across the chain. It aims to draw attention to how the visualization of embodied forms of labour experience can help us understand the social issues and environmental sustainability within different industries. We encourage feminist and political ecological approaches that consider workers as active members of their environments who work to reshape dominant economic and gender norms.

Accepted papers:

Session 1