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…
Tag: labour
“We don’t have to whisper”: Fieldnotes from Odesa
I met Engineer Yakiv[1] on board a merchant ship I had joined just south of Sri Lanka in early 2013. I was there to study seafarers’ perceptions of…
Gavin Smith: Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour
Matan Kaminer’s reflections on the workshop, “Rethinking surplus populations” is full of interesting insights and challenging puzzles. As he says, “operationalizing this concept [surplus populations]…
Andrew Sanchez: Work is Complicated: Thoughts on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs
There’s a Committee for Committees! A few weeks ago, I received a message from a colleague. It was the sort of funny thing that one friend says to…
Massimiliano Mollona: Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism
One of the lowest moments of my undergraduate studies in Economics back in the 1990s happened whilst reading Tom Peters’ Liberation Management (1992), where the management guru/McKinsey-associate pro…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bullshit Jobs
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussants: Massimiliano Mollona & Andrew Sanchez When David Graeber published his article ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’ in Strike! in 2013, he knew he st…
Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea (Book Review)
by Connie Scott “Fish simply appear in supermarkets” (p.209), writes Penny McCall Howard. Most consumers have little or no awareness of where their fish comes from, or of…
Matan Kaminer: Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop
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…
The only lesson is that there aren’t enough jobs
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…
#failures: Living Out of Synch
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…
#Reviews: Fires of Gold
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…
Runways to the Sky #Roadsides
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…
When the Silk Road Vanished #Roadsides
“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…
Social Soils and Chimerical Metabolisms by David Boarder Giles
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)…
Beyond the sensory art of sorting fruit
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…
Our ‘Fashion Fast’: 6-week Reflections
**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…
Our ‘Fashion Fast’: Week 6
**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…
Our ‘Fashion Fast’: Week 3
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…
Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
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,…
The Story of our Fashion Fast!
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…
Work injury compensation still missing in Bangladesh’s labour standards
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…
Freedom, Probation, and The American Dream: Some Thoughts from a New Mexican Factory Floor
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…
No Paninis for Poverty Pay
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…
#Review: Le plus beau métier du monde
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…