Rethinking work
Grounded in an over a decade of ethnographic and anthropological exploration about living, livelihoods and the everyday life, this project explores the discontent with work and workers’ attempts to imagine a life beyond work.
Work occupies our lives and time, but also it shapes our imaginations of society, the economy and even justice. Work includes. However, the promise of inclusion, just as the one of work, cannot be taken at face value. Inclusion, integration and participation are not straightforward guarantees of emancipation. Integration and participation can be instrumental in producing marginality, subjugation and oppression. Low wages, lack of labor protection, precaritization and insecurity at work reinforce oppression and subjugation as the terms of poor people’s inclusion in society.
This project seeks to rethink work by exploring how workers’ acts of refusal and ordinary defiance seek to navigate and challenge how work reinforces experiences of oppression and subjugation. Rethinking work documents workers’ struggles and subjectivities as revolving around workers’ attempts at recapturing a degree of ownership of their bodies and carving out some space and time for themselves.