This workshop is designed to explore various ways to analyze and theorize the organization and experience of work, and the production of social relationships, cultural identities and political subjectivities through work.

The workshop will bring together research examining the ways in which people imagine, search, prepare for, enter, perform, refuse or drop out of work in the continents of Latin America, Africa and Asia. The aim is to map critically the social life of work. Theories of change and analytical insights, as well as empirical accounts, generated in light of experiences in the global North have limited purchase in the global South. The workshop will seek to explore innovative analytical frameworks to explain the experience of work specific to the context of the South, paying particular attention to new developments and historical legacies of work in the region, while also tracing patterns of similarity and dissimilarity with the rest of the world in the current moment of contested globalization. While work, or its absence, remains a singularly important feature of people’s lives, scholars researching different aspects of work are scattered across disparate disciplines and debates.

A key aim of the workshop is to initiate a multidisciplinary network of academics researching work and to provide an ongoing forum to debate and discuss analytical, theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the social life of work, so as to critically, but productively, push the research agenda on the subject, through innovation in research questions, methodology and theory.

The workshop is organised by Professor Nandini Gooptu.