This article advances labour geography’s understanding of worker agency by examining how women actively remake the workplace by forming emotional bonds and community on and off the shop floor. Based ...on 14 months of ethnographic research with women workers in a Nokia cell-phone factory, I prioritise attention to the ways that women act, live, work and struggle in their attempt to ‘rework’ or resist their work-life situations in a patriarchal capitalist system. I show that in the everyday practices and experiences of work and work life, women form complex feelings towards their workplaces, including a sense of self-worth and feelings of belonging and mutual care. Work is more than just a job. The research urges greater recognition of the ways in which: (a) agency is produced in the workplace through the everyday social practice of care and emotional bonds that women form with each other and, through that, to their work; (b) that agency acts both as a form of resistance and as a form of attachment to the workplace; and (c) for women, work is not just about wages – nor is it just about social reproduction through the family – it is also about the social reproduction of new identities and forms of community that are forged at work, which both shape and are shaped by their experiences as workers.
Labour geography foregrounds the role of workers in shaping geographies of work by paying attention to the larger actions of labour in response to the capital and state. It however pays less ...attention to the everyday geographies of labour and the complexities of the ‘social being’ in trying to understand workers motivations and responses. This review argues for labour geography to look beyond the factory gates to understand the nuanced politics of labour as relations get ‘reworked’ within a patriarchal-capitalist society. It argues for paying close attention to the life stories and experiences of workers, to create linkages between lives as waged workers in a formal workspace with the informal nature of work-life outside, without losing sight of the larger struggles of labour and global processes, to develop a more grounded understanding of worker’s agency and actions.
Feminist scholarship has drawn attention to the multiple places of labour and the intersection of social relations that shape women's geographies of work. Acknowledging feminist research on gender ...dynamics of globalization of production and household relations in 'making available' women's labour to the global capital, this article foregrounds explanations offered by the women, through their life stories, of their decisions to enter social relations of waged work. These young women worked in an electronics special economic zone in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where I argue that for women 'becoming' workers is not merely about entering into waged work or a scripted notion of class identity, but a complex process through which women's labour gets incorporated into the relations of (re)production and their ability to negotiate these relations to gain control over their bodies and labour. Their consciousness of 'becoming' workers is deeply embedded in their awareness and experiences of the gendered relations of labour at homes and their desire to change their life circumstances. Focusing on work-life experiences beyond employment relations, this article highlights the everyday 'micro-scale' struggles of women as they negotiate household relations of labour where escape and responsibility form part of their survival strategies and politics of work.
India ranks fifth in the global garment exports. The bedrock of this export industry are poorly paid, migrant women and men. Marked by high rate of exploitation and precarious employment, garment ...workers are often perceived as a dispossessed lot without any means to resist their exploitation. What possibilities remain within this narrative to make room for everyday politics and resistances? Looking at the individual and collective struggles of garment workers in two southern Indian states, this article highlights the everyday organizing strategies of women resisting their 'disposibility'. Specifically, the article draws attention to women's life stories to demonstrate what can be learnt from them about the conditions under which to imagine, and come to, build labour unions. The article contributes to the critical feminist scholarship on global factories by explicating the tension between the need to illuminate the extent of exploitation and the urgency of drawing attention to women's stories.
Abstract We reflect on Geography in the US university by focusing on the paths taken by undergraduates into and beyond our classrooms. Those paths reveal aspects of Geography that appear unique to ...this national context, and include the structural barriers to US students' entry into Geography, from their highly uneven exposure to Geography in school to their unfamiliarity with it as a university degree. Yet many students still manage to find the field, with the troubling exception of Black and Indigenous students. We also highlight the paradox whereby graduates of this ‘invisible’ field are in high demand within government and industry, even as their training encourages them to simultaneously critique the tight coupling of Geography with those structures of power. We suggest that these are the distinctive and constitutive attributes of Geography in US universities that shape undergraduates and the geographies that they take out into the world.
Short Abstract We reflect on Geography in the US university by focusing on the paths taken by undergraduates into and beyond our classrooms. We suggest that these are the distinctive and constitutive attributes of Geography in US universities that shape undergraduates and the geographies that they take out into the world.
A New Year Brings Change to the GLJ Cook, Maria Lorena; Dutta, Madhumita; Gallas, Alexander ...
Global labour journal,
01/2022, Letnik:
13, Številka:
1
Journal Article
In this article, I reflect on the 'creative turn' to my research as I encountered methodological failures in doing field research in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. My research was focused ...around the lives and labor of young migrant women who had come to work in an electronics factory inside a Special Economic Zone located outside the city of Chennai. While I was committed to a collaborative approach to enable women to tell their stories with 'an intimacy, complexity and force', I inadvertently produced 'space(s) of failure' during fieldwork that did not necessarily create meaningful collaborations. However, things changed significantly as a possibility emerged to create something together in the form of public radio podcasts. It opened up the space for conversations and motivated the women to come up with their own ideas and themes for discussions. The possibility of being heard in their own voice played an important role in producing such collaboration. The podcasts were acts of speech through which they put into circulation their viewpoints about the society and their place within it. I reflect here on the 'productive failures' during fieldwork that led to the possibility of new forms of creative collaboration that was generative of wonderful insights.
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