I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part…
Every so often something happens that perfectly encapsulates the consumptive death rattle that is the job market in higher education. A few weeks ago, the department of anthropology…
In their introduction to this thematic series, and the symposium that preceded it, Berisha, Mafizzoli and Ojani invite us to reflect on what happens when breakdown becomes the…
As of 2019, Ghana is the country with the largest gold-mining industry in Africa, overtaking South Africa, after two South African gold mining companies shifted focus on the…
Road building in the Maldives – an archipelago of small coralline islands – sounds a bit like a euphemism for a ridiculous task. Maldivian roads present uniquely closed…
“I still need to cross Attabad before I reach home” – so our Shimshali travel companion commented matter-of-factly. We had just spent ten days walking along the Pakistan–Afghanistan…
The metabolic rift “All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil,” Marx (1976: 637-38)…
Sorting fruit may be a sensory art, and it is possible to get entirely lost in the aesthetics of skilful hands and the physicality of localised knowledge. But…
**We are thrilled to have completed our 6-week, 6-item ‘fashion fast’ and have raised more than £600 for the labour rights NGO, Labour Behind the Label. If you would like…
**We are thrilled to have completed our 6-week, 6-item ‘fashion fast’ and have raised more than £600 for the labour rights NGO, Labour Behind the Label. If you would like…
by Alfred Lewis **Read about the first and second week of our ‘fashion fast’ here and here. If you can, please donate to our efforts to raise money for the labour rights…
Today, the 25th of March, marks the anniversary of New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 garment workers lost their lives. The fire occurred in 1911,…
by Rebecca Prentice, Hannah Amey, Maeve Devers, Rifka Fehr, Olive Howland Milne, Alfred Lewis, Phoebe Marsh, Joana Pereira and Amelia Yates As eight first-year anthropology students and one lecturer a…
by Rebecca Prentice **Republished from The Conversation.** In the five years since the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Bangladesh – in which more than 1,134…
by Jonny Craig In his 2016 release, Interstate: Hitchhiking through the State of a Nation, travel-writer Julian Sarayer chronicles his unorthodox and remarkable journey from New York to…
by Rebecca Prentice Throughout the UK yesterday restaurant and food delivery workers walked off their jobs to protest low wages, zero hours contracts, and unpredictable work schedules—including those…
Giulia Mensitieri’s book “Le plus beau métier du monde” Dans les coulisses de l’industrie de la mode examines labor in the cultural and creative industries. Analyzing fashion as…
Why is there growing inequality in wealth distribution in the US? Is inequality inevitable? If inequality is inevitable, can it be useful? Can inequality become a problem? If…
In Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy, Richard E. Ocejo explores four traditionally working-class jobs – barbering, bartending, distilling and butchery – that have been…
…A Quick Manifesto by a group of Anthropology and Global Studies students at the University of Sussex As both consumers of knowledge capital, and investors in our own education, we…
Unfortunately, precarity in academia has become a well-worn cliché… not least of all for those of us living in this state of ontological insecurity. In Canada, most university…
Unfortunately, precarity in academia has become a well-worn cliché… not least of all for those of us living in this state of ontological insecurity. In Canada, most university…
by Hannah Loosley **A version of this post was published at ecnmy.org.** Women working in care, catering, cleaning, cashier and clerical jobs (the 5 Cs) have long been…
by Geert De Neve and Rebecca Prentice (Previously posted on The Conversation UK.) Five years ago last month, in November 2012, a fire in the Tazreen Fashions factory…