Changing Labour Relations and the Making of Livelihoods
In order to understand the growth of precarity and informality in the world of work, more ethnographic fieldwork is needed that looks into how labour relations are changing under conditions of neoliberal globalization today.
While industrial work is rapidly expanding as a source of income, particularly in some parts of Asia and Latin America, entire regions are facing de-industrialization in the Northern hemisphere. In-depth fieldwork on trade unionism, labour activism and the politics of work is as much needed today as are explorations into the question of how gender, age or ethnicity may complicate both people’s lived experiences of work and their (often rather tentative) affiliation with the working class. Investigations into the social and material connections that make up various infrastructures that are central to capitalism (e.g. pipelines, coal plants, shipyards) are equally as timely. How are such infrastructures made and unmade through the daily efforts of the ordinary people living and laboring around them?
Finally, research projects on work / livelihoods in light of the rapid growth of global cities today are also urgently needed. With the transformation from countryside-based peasant to city-bound worker, quite often, new patterns of consumption, life-styles and forms of housing emerge, as do novel forms of sociality, all of which provide ample ground for ethnographic fieldwork.
Potential field sites: Europe, North America, Philippines, South Korea.
(Receding) US Empire and the Asia-Pacific
A comparative exploration of the effects of the (currently seemingly fading) influence of the United States on the Asia Pacific region is an urgent matter these days.
From social movements countering contentious trade agreements to local attempts to grapple with legacies of US colonialism; from the effects of American security agreements and their military bases in the region to the waxing and waning dominance of US pop culture today, from the “McDonaldisation” of local cuisines (and the counter-movements against this trend) to a focus on shifting sexualities in countries that have had extensive exposure to the United States: there are many questions to be explored when it comes to the Asia-Pacific region, which is increasingly coming to grips with the disintegration of US hegemony.
Potential field-sites for research could be South Korea, Japan, the Philippines or Guam.
Containerships
Contact: Elisabeth Schober