Platform Workers’ Organizing Diaries: Messages from Union Organizers to Researchers
This article is the first article in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network[1] . Read…
Tag: labour
Mobility as Dependence: Politics of Getting Around for Migrant Farmworkers in Rural Vermont
During Tania’s summer 2025 internship at the Open Door Clinic in Addison County, Vermont, she translated for a migrant farmworker, […] The post Mobility as Dependence: Politics of…
Strengthening Women’s Financial Rights After Marriage: Matrimonial Property under Muslim Family Law in Pakistan
While Islamic family law in Pakistan has shown a jurisprudential trend towards strengthening women’s rights in divorce — including some aspects of women’s financial rights — recognition of…
Ethnography of an Interface: Self-Tracking, Quantified Self, and the Work of Digital Connections
Yuliya Grinberg. 2025. Ethnography of an Interface: Self-Tracking, Quantified Self, and the Work of Digital Connections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. […] The post Ethnography of an Int…
Ståle Knudsen: The Invisible Hard Toilers of The Green Transition in The Maritime Sector: Shipyard Workers in Turkey
How do companies handle responsibilities to people and the environment when they operate abroad? What tools do they use, and what are the effects? These have been throughgoing…
Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture
Matan Kaminer. 2024. Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Matan Kaminer’s new book is […] The post Capitalist Colonial: Thai Mig…
How gender, labour and tech intersect in Bangalore’s startup culture
Hemangini Gupta‘s Experimental Times explores the gendered dynamics of startup capitalism in Bangalore, offering a rich ethnographic study of labour, urban space, and entrepreneurship. Tanushree…
Being Fungible – They Only Want Us from the Neck Down
They Only Want Us from the Neck Down Across the airport car park, a figure in a mad dash—a sprawl […] The post Being Fungible – They Only…
A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in New India
In this excerpt from A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in New India, Asiya Islam examines the lives of educated young women working in precarious jobs in Delhi’s service sector. The…
Patricia Ward: Power, Pace, and Place: Local Consultants and Racialized Expertise
Critical scholars recognize humanitarianism as a racializing project rooted in colonial and imperial relations, in which classifications of aid workers as ‘international’, ‘expat’, ‘national’ and ‘loc…
Of rails and rubbish: critique and the absurdity of cleaning days
In January 2020, the Senegalese President Macky Sall announced a nation-wide ‘Cleaning Day’. Together with a ‘Zero waste’ campaign and followed by monthly ‘Cleaning Days’, he invited citizens to…
Review: ‘Reclaiming the discarded: life and labour on Rio’s garbage dump’ (2018)
by Holly Cawsey In June 2012, Rio de Janeiro saw the close of Jardim Gramacho, one of the largest landfills in the world. At its height, Jardim Gramacho…
Encountering Precarities: The Podcast
Allegra Editor Ian sits down with Thread guest editors Viola Castellano & Olivia Casagrande to discuss ‘Encountering precarities: ethnography, spurious solidarity and neoliberal academia.…
Unfinished adulthood: discontinuous precarities as epistemic opportunities
This post is part of our Encountering Precarities series. The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and t…
A striking comparison: on young Senegalese wrestlers and precarious scholars
This post is part of our Encountering Precarities series. The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and t…
Unsteady grounds: On ethnography, academic precarity, and motherhood
This post is part of our Encountering Precarities series. The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and t…
Encountering precarities: ethnography, spurious solidarity and neoliberal academia
In the wake of calls for responsibility and for ‘Raising our voice’ (AAA 2020), early-career researchers’ in anthropology risk to bear the weight to redeem the discipline while…
How to use health technologies to “kill one little deer in the dark forest”
There is a global push towards making AI more ethical and transparent. As critical contributions on the topic of AI have pointed out: even when computational applications are…
Yes, Scholar-Publishers Can Make Common Cause After All
Last spring, I began work with the open access advocacy group, Libraria, as a Community Convener to help organize a mutual aid network amongst a group of open…
Ep #101: When Anthropology Strikes Back: Strikes & Casualisation in Academia
The Familiar Strange · Ep #101: When Anthropology Strikes Back: Strikes & Casualisation in Academia This week we’re back for a really important panel. This week, Familiar Strangers…
An anthropological chronicle from EASA 2022
I invite you to share in a partial and subjective review of the exhausting academic marathon that was the 17th congress of the European Association of Social Anthropologists…
Global health meets sugar capitalism
After a long drive, Sheila and I arrive at the gates of a sprawling fifty-one square mile Malawian sugar plantation that belongs to Africa’s largest sugar company. An…
Can scholar-led publishers find common cause?
Image by Nick Youngson, courtesy of Picpedia.org. A couple of months ago, I was trawling Twitter looking for inspiration when I came across a notice that Libraria –…
Mobile Humanitarians: Mobilities after Displacement
In this webinar series, we explore the relationship between mobility and humanitarianism in the course of four episodes. We – this is Till Mostowlansky, an anthropologist at The…