Orgainsing Team: Anne Kukuczka (UZH) and Asiya Islam (LSE)
Research into the world of work has been reanimated by the Covid19 pandemic, rapid advancement of digital technologies, increased informalisation and precarisation of work around the world, and more broadly mass wagelessness. Feminist scholars have highlighted the significance of the frame of ‘social reproduction’ – the work of sustaining life on an everyday basis, as well as generationally – to understand how people are navigating, responding to, and resisting these conditions characteristic of neoliberal globalisation. Drawing inspiration from these interventions, we invite contributions for a one-day workshop from scholars who use ethnographic research to explore the intersection of gender, work, and subjectivity, specifically in South Asia. We understand ‘work’ as an expansive category, encompassing varied types of employment as well as the labour of life-making, and indeed the relationship between these. We see ‘gender’ both as a significant analytic that pushes us to consider work as this expansive category, and as a social relation that shapes and is shaped by work. We focus on ‘subjectivities’ to engage with the everyday experiences of – being subjected to as well as desiring – socio- economic transformations. We hope that ethnographic research located in varied South Asian contexts will animate in-depth insights into gender, work, and subjectivity.
Together, we would like to explore some of the following (and related) themes:
- The dialectical relationship between gender and work and how notions of masculinity and femininity are challenged, reproduced, and reconfigured at the site of work
- The interaction between locally salient forms of inequalities (e.g., class, caste, ethnicity) and new forms of work and new work places
- The gendered meanings of work for people’s sense of self and sociality
- Work and desire, particularly practices of self-fashioning, consumption, and leisure
- The work of becoming a worker, particularly the politics of skills and the role of training
- Work beyond the wage, how people pool multiple forms of (waged and unwaged work) for sustenance
We conceive this workshop as a space for collective brainstorming, scholarly exchange and the creation of a community of like-minded scholars. Regardless of the current stage of your research projects, we invite potential participants to submit contributions prior to the workshop that can include work in progress papers, drafts and excerpts of chapters (max. 6000 words).
The workshop will close with a joint dinner.
To participate, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short bio note (100 words) by October 20, 2025 to anne.kukuczka(at)uzh.ch and A.Islam1(at)lse.ac.uk. We will get back to you about the outcome of participation by October 27, 2025. For a lively and productive engagement with each other’s work, we plan to pre-circulate contributions amongst participants by December 8, 2025.