Anthropology of Work Review

China’s Low Rights Model Goes Global China achieved manufacturing dominance thanks to its weaker protections for workers, communities, and the environment. Now it’s exporting that model.

Unjust transition is under way

"Western carmakers and battery giants... have become willing participants in this model, often turning a blind eye to the labor and environmental shortcuts that make their net-zero targets affordable."

The Care Factory - Boston Review In the decades since the Wages for Housework movement, care work has become a site of profit in ways its leaders could never have predicted.

“The wish that women’s work be waged seems to have come true albeit in funhouse-mirror form: legions of women now work in low-paid roles caring for other peoples’ families, while the vast majority still take care of their own families for free”

www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

my “AI is over” anecdote is that my wife was hired over the summer to write scripts for a big tech company explaining how to use their AI tools and after many rounds of revisions, the latest notes said “we’re finding a lot of AI fatigue among our users” and to remove all references to AI

More than 1,000 Amazon workers warn rapid AI rollout threatens jobs and climate Workers say the firm’s ‘warp-speed’ approach fuels pressure, layoffs and rising emissions

"1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing “serious concerns” abt AI development, saying that the company’s “all-costs justified, warp speed” approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to "democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Wonderful, urgent essay by @emilybaughan.bsky.social in @bostonreview.bsky.social on the recognition and politicisation of care work in the long shadow of Wages for Housework. www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

Our cover features a sculptural work, ’25 Days,’ by Indo-South African artist Zenaéca Singh. The sculpture, made from sugar, activates the archive of indentured Indo-South African labour and migration and encapsulates the theme of this special issue.

Roads, Marketplaces and Plantations (Roadsides Journal Article)

The new issue of @roadsides.bsky.social includes my photo essay "Roads, Marketplaces and Plantations" in #PapuaNewGuinea.

I discuss how the unequal relations and struggle between plantation companies, workers and peasants are materialized in enacted through food and #infrastructure.

#anthropology

Sonic Anthropology | Voices of the People - The cultural work of New Orleans community radio with Katie Moylan In this episode of Sonic Anthropology Radio, media scholar Katie Moylan shares her thoughts on New Orleans community radio and what makes it so special.

A short piece I did for the Sonic Anthropology Radio podcast with Thomas Miller with some great clips from NOLA radio!
sonic-anthropology.mixlr.com/recordings/2...

The cover of 'Hard Work' by Tuomas Tammisto, accompanied by a quote from Dr. Sophie Chao from the University of Sydney. The quote reads: "A true labor of care and creativity, this ethnography promises to become a landmark work in environmental anthropology, political ecology, and Pacific studies."

Tuomas Tammisto's monograph 'Hard Work' (2024) combines a #PoliticalEcology focus on the connection between #environmental issues and power relations with a focus on how value is produced, represented, and materialized.

Read or download the book for free at: doi.org/10.33134/HUP...

An important discussion, organized by #APLA and #ASAP, will be held tomorrow, Nov 22, 6:30-9pm at Ashé Cultural Arts center! #AAA2025 #Anthropology

New from Practicing Anthropology: The Cost of Precarity in U.S. Higher Education by Emma Abell-Selby
doi.org/10.1080/08884552.2025.2581785

@practicinganthro1.bsky.social
#SfAA #socialscience #anthropology #appliedanthropology #PracticingAnthropology

Impending Strike in Las Vegas Exposes Labor Abuses in Service Sector Nationwide Service work now dominates the economy. That changes how we build worker power, scholar Annie McClanahan says.

Interview with Annie McClanahan on service work and the impending strike in Las Vegas.

truthout.org/articles/imp...

"The idea that the market is somehow opposed to and independent of government has been used at least since the 19th century to justify laissez-faire economic policies, but such policies never actually have the effect of lessening the role of government. In late 19th century England, for instance, an increasingly liberal society did not lead to a reduction of state bureaucracy but the opposite: an endlessly mushrooming array of legal clerks, registrars, inspectors, notaries, and police officials."

Neo-liberalism is build on myths. One such myth is that their laissez-faire and "free market" policies will reduce bureaucracy.

Anthropology of Work Review | AAA Labor Studies Journal | Wiley Online Library This paper analyzes the content of India's digital self-help gurus (SHGs), who are popular online figures in India, and engages a varied online audience across multiple social media platforms. We exa....

New paper alert! 📢

"Enterprising Citizens: Digital Self-Help Gurus in Post-Liberalization India" by Riddhi Bhandari & Siddhi Gyan Pandey.
A look at how SHGs reshape aspirations, normalize failure, and push entrepreneurial citizenship in #India.

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Souleymane's Story GEP Newsletter

Souleymane's Story, available on some streaming platforms, is a great film revealing the reality of the food delivery industry in Europe, where black market exploitation of undocumented migrants is rampant.
eomail5.com/web-version?...

Cover of Sweatshop Capital with labor activists marching in the streets

Join us in congratulating Ideas on Fire author Beth Robinson on the publication of Sweatshop Capital: Profit, Violence, and Solidarity Movements in the Long Twentieth Century, out now from @dukepress.bsky.social!

dukeupress.edu/sweatshop-ca...

#IoFAuthors

There is a specter haunting the globe. Once imagined as a hollow revenant of 20th century catastrophe, fascism again looms large in our political present: as a resurrected governing formation; a glaring threat to minority lifeways; a crisis of liberal norms; an incendiary charge to lob at one's opponents; and, perhaps most often, a question. Questions like the oft-invoked "Is this fascism, yet?" embed a temporality that makes it hard to mobilize, for they posit fascism as that which cannot be named until too late. Historically, conceptually, politically, we hold this position is untenable. Rather, the ghosts of fascism are emergent, tangible, hauntological presences across a spectrum of horizons.

This roundtable therefore gathers scholars who are not content to consign fascism to the extreme, nor to the 20th century. We study fascism that calls itself by many names and charges banal sites of social life: mundane violences that emerge in liberal institutions, structure school curricula, shape relationships with nature, identify as "critical" and "feminist." Turning from book burnings to blockbuster films, dictators to PTAs, and examining sites of racialized and gendered violence across the Global North and South, we consider fascism not as an ideal type but as it haunts the everyday – all with an eye toward grasping fash-ish moods before they advance into full-fledged fascist masses.

Despite a growing sense that fascism is on the rise, boundary work has muddled what could be a clarion call for antifascist research. Popular responses range from naive tolerance to bloody confrontation, and academics appear hamstrung by a similar dissensus. Some frame fascism as an illiberal force; others as an apparition that stupefies the masses into (neo)liberal norms. Some call developing a general theory of fascism the most pressing matter of our time; others hold the concept loses teeth when abstracted. Some lament that fascism "is not who we are" in liberal democracies, while others locate its inception at democracies' frontiers. These debates are hardly frivolous, but while they unfold, fascism unfolds, too. There are questions worth exploring that do not hinge on their belabored resolution. And anthropology, ever curious about the instability of meaning, is precisely the discipline to ask them.

In short: we believe anthropology has rarely been more needed, but also that our field needs work to meet this moment. Recent scholarship has gestured notionally toward the possibilities of an antifascist anthropology, but the time has come for thinking programmatically. Together, we ask what fascism becomes when unhinged from its natal contexts. We map its spectral presence in domains from home to healthcare, economy to education. We inquire how to approach it as an ethnographic object and as the condition of our lives and work. And we consider how to remake anthropology into an antifascist discipline that can fight back not only in theory, but in practice.

Friends attending #AAA2025 - some health stuff is keeping me from all the spooky fun in NOLA but I have to boost this Thursday sesh on “The Specter of Fascism” co-organized with the best comrades. GET THERE! There will be brilliant people, urgent scheming, ZINES. #anthrosky 👻📚✊✨

We hope you can join us for this important event on Sat Nov 22 eve in New Orleans, LA. #ASAP #APLA #AAA2025

Don’t forget Starbucks workers are on strike and there are plenty of other places to fuel your #AAA2025! ☕️

SNAP is a lifeline for workers in low-wage jobs.

Meanwhile, CEOs are paid 280x as much as the typical worker.

Don’t be angry at workers for using food stamps.

Be angry at the corporations paying them so little that they need them.

Five Books on Labor and Ecology - Public Books Our scorching planetary age results from the conjoined forces of colonial extractivism, fossil capitalism, and postcolonial developmentalism.

Five Books on Labor and Ecology www.publicbooks.org/five-books-o...

Culture@Large: Spectral City––Walking New Orleans through Slavery’s Present Pasts with Rashauna Johnson Sat, November 22 | Sheraton – Orpheus (8th fl) (access via elevator only) 4 PM – 5 PM New Orleans was a critical hub for the global circulation of slaves and became a metropolis with an explosion of slave population, who claimed one third of the city's population in the early nineteenth century. Society for Cultural Anthropology presents its flagship event, Culture@Large, to trace the lasting legacies of slavery etched onto the urban landscapes of New Orleans and to reflect upon geographies of unfreedom, which have shaped the city and beyond. This event consists of a lecture (open to public) and walking tour of New Orleans (for registered participants). Rashauna Johnson, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the award-winning author of Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2016), will deliver a lecture entitled "Where Sidewalks Talk: New Orleans and Global Geographies of Unfreedom" at the AAA conference venue. Professor Johnson will then lead a walking tour of New Orleans.

Coming up this Saturday! Our annual Culture@Large event—now with New Orleans walking tour! Join historian Rashauna Johnson for an event you won't want to miss this AAA. (Talk open to all, tour requires registration)

Join our workshop! From Submission to Publication: Advice from ECRs from AAA. We will be joined by editors from: Economic Anthropology, Anthropology of Work Review, PoLAR, City & Society, and Journal for the Anthropology of North America. Free to attend

Calling all Early Career Researchers heading to the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting!

👋Join us Friday, Nov 21 (4:15-5:45 PM) for our workshop
📖 From Submission to Publication: Advice for ECRs from AAA Editors
📍 Grand Couteau, 5th floor

See you there!

Job opportunity!

ODID and Linacre College seek applications for an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Development.

⏰ Deadline: 11 December

Full information: www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/vacancy/asso...

For anyone heading to the #AAA2025 (@americananthro.bsky.social), we’re hosting a roundtable on Marxism and Anthropology — would love to see you there.

Sociological processes are at work in the field of sociology
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Motivations for Refusal In Motivations for Refusal: Work, Value, and the Limits of Postworkerism, Mark Gawne develops a critical account of how the affective politics of capital and class are formed and contested in contempo...

Reading this, written by a comrade, and it's ace books.google.com.au/books/about/...

if you're interested in this story, you might be interested in our reading group; we're reading chapter 5 of "The AI Con" by @alexhanna.bsky.social and @emilymbender.bsky.social this week

Varieties of academic precarity across (and beyond) Europe: Anthropology of Labour Network Webinar Join us for the upcoming Anthropology of Labour Network webinar on experiences of academic precarity. 12 November, 17-19 CET. With Bhargabi Das, Martin Fotta, Mariya Ivancheva, Roberto Mozzachiodi and...

📢 Varieties of academic precarity across (and beyond) Europe: @easainfo.bsky.social Anthropology of Labour network Webinar TOMORROW w/ Bhargabi Das, Martin Fotta, @mariya-ivancheva.bsky.social , Roberto Mozzachiodi & Aslı Vatansever ! easaonline.org/event/variet...

Write a blogpost for the World of Work Blog on the Anthropology Career Readiness Network (ACRN) website! More details👇 @anthrocareerready.bsky.social