Unpicking Precarity: Informal Work in Eastern India's Coal Mining Tracts

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores two widespread types of informal and precarious work in eastern India's coal mining tracts. It seeks to contribute to recent attempts to disaggregate the umbrella notion of precarity and the related concept of ‘classes of labour’ in the context of the global South. It does so by illuminating the more nuanced yet significant relative distinctions between different forms of precarious coal-related work as perceived and experienced by labourers. The article illustrates how labourers evaluate such forms of work in relation to one another in terms of relative stability, autonomy, tempo and gender dynamics, which affect their livelihood decisions and activities. It thereby turns attention to differentiating dimensions of precarious work that are easily veiled in broad debates about precarity and ‘classes of labour’. Such dimensions are essential to probe — through comparative ethnographic study — to understand how people engage with different modalities of precarious work on the ground and how they configure their livelihood strategies in particular capitalist and social contexts.     

Infrastructural territorialisations: Mega-infrastructures and the (re)making of Kenya

This paper, based on historical and contemporary dynamics of railway infrastructures in Kenya, analyses how mega-infrastructures are central in state practices of infrastructural territorialisation – an infrastructure-based production of territoriality as a historically and geographically specific form of spatio-political order and organisation, imbued with social tensions, stemming from the state-led imposition of a techno-politics onto its territory. Focusing on territorial and political objectives of the state advanced through the Uganda Railway and the Standard Gauge Railway, the paper demonstrates how both of these projects have been central in colonial and contemporary practices of infrastructural territorialisation, albeit in mercurial ways that do not fully represent original techno-political intensions of the state. This discussion, first, highlights how megaprojects – although primarily analysed by recent geographical scholarship as advancing contemporary geographies of global capitalism – also contingently coalesce with state (re)territorialisation practices. Second, undertaking these analyses in the Kenyan context, the paper shows how, despite shared historical dynamics of contingent state territorialisation – and the reconstitution of racial and socio-economic inequalities, advanced through megaprojects that in Kenya are socially interpreted through historical experiences of colonialism – current infrastructural territorialisations are also different; whilst the colonial territorialisation of Kenya emerged as relatively unchallenged, its present state territory-making is undermined by both the global character of megaprojects and the external actors that the state relies on for its practices of infrastructural territorialisation.     

Gender,precarity and hybrid forms of work identity in the virtual domestic arts and crafts industry in Canada and the US

Over the last several decades, there has been a growing recognition of the precarious nature of employment in creative economies, including craft industries. Despite this work, little research has explored how the rise of the platform economy is affecting labour market precarity. Our article explores the nature of precarity in craft blogging, looking in particular at the domestic arts and crafts. We examine how a growing number of women have left other forms of employment to engage in sewing, knitting, quilting, cooking and baking. Many women have also taken to blogging about their endeavors. However, there is a paucity of research on the variety of types of work that craft bloggers engage in and the challenges they face. Drawing upon interviews with female domestic arts bloggers in Canada and the United States, the article explores the work that craft bloggers engage in, the space and time of labour, and the variable sources of income that they access through their work. The article analyzes the experiences of precarious labour that arise at the interface of craft and the internet, and the multiple identities that stem from hybrid forms of creative work.     

Bodies as urban infrastructure: Gender,intimate infrastructures and slow infrastructural violence

Drawing from deep longitudinal and ethnographic work, this article interrogates a set of key relationships between bodies, gender and infrastructure in the context of understanding cities such as Bharatpur and Dhangadhi in Nepal as well as Delhi, India. This article seeks to make two contributions. First, utilizing feminist political geography approaches, we examine bodies as infrastructure, referring to how the social and material work of the body helps to build, develop and maintain cities through gendered infrastructures in the everyday. We show conceptualizing bodies as infrastructure reveals important and intimate dimensions of the everyday politics and social and material forms that enable critical resources to flow and integral networks be built in cities. Second, we demonstrate from our comparative case studies the ways that gendered “slow infrastructural violence” accrues through patterns of infrastructural invisibility. Particular bodies act as urban infrastructure in everyday and unremarkable ways, shaping the uneven social and political consequences of embodied infrastructural configurations. We specifically examine slow violence and informal financial infrastructure in Bharatpur and the provisioning of health in Dhangadhi followed by the exploration of slow violence and fragmented water in Delhi. This article thus raises a simultaneous call for theoretical engagement with the socio-materiality of infrastructure and the body, an increased regard for the multiplicity of urban infrastructures, and an interrogation of gender and infrastructural politics in cities where more people will be living in the future and where politics and infrastructure are being actively created.     

Tourism global production networks and uneven social upgrading in Kenya and Uganda

This paper addresses how the growth of tourism global production networks (GPNs) based in Kenya and Uganda created uneven social upgrading outcomes for workers and communities. A tourism GPN and social upgrading framework follows a global political economy approach to analyzing tourism development and labor in diverse tourism geographies. Two tourism GPNs are investigated: Mombasa, Kenya, and Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda. Four main findings emerge: (1) governance relationships between tour operator and accommodation firms directly impacted social upgrading outcomes for hotel workers and indirectly for excursion workers; (2) excursion workers and community members had precarious connections to tourism GPNs; (3) public governance and collective power were key components to social upgrading while supporting its unevenness; and (4) societal embeddedness constructions around gender and regional space influenced worker and community social upgrading potential. Social upgrading is shaped by a confluence of firm, institution, geography, and labor conditions that differentially materializes in specific tourism GPN arrangements.     

The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism: State,Environment, and Race in Lerma,Mexico

This article explores the relations between infrastructures, labour, and internal colonialism in Lerma, Mexico. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research of two hydraulic projects there, the article argues that infrastructures are productive of the racial, environmental, and political relations that constitute internal colonialism both historically and contemporarily. I show how these infrastructural projects imagined and produced colonial relations between the environment, racialised workers, and the nation-state, and how these colonial logics endure today through infrastructures and the forms of racialised labour that maintain them. In doing so, this article contributes to literature that interrogates the relations between infrastructure and coloniality by focusing on how infrastructural labour makes internal colonialism enduring. The article concludes by reflecting on how the labour practices that make internal colonialism enduring also point to ways of producing infrastructures otherwise.     

Infrastructural Discontent in the Sanitary City: Waste,Revolt, and Repression in Cairo

In this article, I examine the relationship between waste, revolt, and repression in Cairo's sanitation system from the early 20^th century to the present. I coin the term infrastructural discontent in the sanitary city to describe how discontent slowly accretes around Cairo's sanitation system and becomes a powerful force in the city's politics—a force that can be mobilised for popular revolt and state repression. I detail three expressions of infrastructural discontent in Cairo's sanitation system, paying careful attention to the deeply related mundane and spectacular productions of these expressions. Tracing the formation of infrastructural discontent in the sanitary city, I show how resistance and repression are produced and contested in material infrastructural relations which contain the accretions of long‐standing struggles over colonialism, development, and uneven urbanisation.     

Rock Stars and Bad Apples: Moral Economies of Alternative Food Networks and Precarious Farm Work Regimes

Alternative food networks face both challenges and opportunities in rethinking the role of precarious employment in food system transformation. We explore how alternative food networks in British Columbia, Canada have engaged with flexible and precarious work regimes for farmworkers, including both temporary migrant workers and un(der)paid agricultural interns. Based on in‐depth interviews, participant observation and document analysis, we find that alternative food actors often normalize a precarious work regime using a moral economy frame. This framing describes precarious farm employment as either a necessary challenge in the transition to sustainability, or merely involving a few individual “bad apple” farmers. Further, this framing involves an aversion to “one‐size‐fits‐all” regulation by the state in favor of consumer‐driven regulation of labor standards. Our analysis suggests that a moral economy framing can obscure systemic inequities in precarious farm employment and dampen the impetus for structural change through collective food movement organizing.     

A Platform for Art: Infrastructural Citizenship Beyond Monumentality in Toronto’s Transit Art

The flourishing of transit art globally reflects a widespread belief in the power of aesthetic practices to promote infrastructural and civic revitalisation. This article analyses how transit art engages spaces and practices of publicness and how art explores ideas of mobility in Toronto. It argues that while arts are frequently deployed to reproduce status quo relations of power and to bolster elite and exclusionary forms of urbanisation, they can also work to challenge these. Through the notion of infrastructural citizenship, I show how arts can unsettle grounds of public space and public life and illuminate the contentious relations that cohere in public transit space. Overall, I claim that transit networks are a key platform through which the politics of public art are staged and that despite existing constraints, there are many affordances for transit art to critically intervene into neoliberal urban processes.     

Doing the handfailure: At the margins of global capitalism

What can an account of manual labour in an increasingly precarious environment tell us about how humans build meaningful lives? Using an ethnographic example from the working relations on a fishing boat based out of the fishing community Tombo in Sierra Leone, I argue that shared bodily work entails possibilities of individual economic gain while simultaneously laying the foundations for solidarity and care. We find a playful competition between working mates at the core of this seeming contradiction. This article explores how people make a living and make a life, not simply despite their continued marginalization in political and economic terms, but through it. In the physically demanding shared labour of hauling a fishing net and learning how to compete for the fish by doing the handfailure, crew members forge relations of care and solidarity that stimulate individual aspirations while asserting the right to life by the sea.     

All aboard? Women working the spaces of gentrification in Toronto's Junction

Despite early attention being paid to the connections amongst ‘gender, work and gentrification’ in the urban geography literature, there have been few attempts to examine the experiences of women as workers in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This gap leaves open critical questions about the nature of the links between the production of gendered work practices and the production of gentrified urban landscapes. In this article, I explore how women working in a variety of differently precarious situations – as struggling small business owners, self-employed workers and part-time workers – manage the tensions and contradictions of struggling for economic survival while attempting to support community-building efforts and social reproduction needs in a gentrifying area. Using data drawn from interviews and urban ethnographic methods in Toronto's ‘Junction’ neighbourhood, I argue that precarious conditions of work in the context of gentrification engender a variety of diverse economic and social practices – developed through immaterial and affective labour – that, in turn, produce particular, and often contradictory, social and economic landscapes of gentrification. I will explore the ways in which gendered vulnerabilities and insecurities are ironically produced, in part, by the feminized consumption landscape, which primes neighbourhoods for widespread gentrification. Through examining these dynamics, we can begin to theorize the structural production of precarity, and in particular, gendered precarity, through urban processes such as gentrification.     

Building communities in a post-conflict society: churches and peace-building initiatives in northern ireland since 1994

In 1994 the IRA and Loyalist paramilitary groups declared ceasefires, leading to a more relaxed attitude and cross-community contacts in Northern Ireland. The result was the establishment of a new type of church-based reconciliation group, the Church Fora, intended to improve community relations and promote peace and reconciliation within local areas. This article focuses on the ways in which Church Fora have expanded the methods of such work since 1994. It will assess their effectiveness in promoting peace and reconciliation and developing community relations in Northern Ireland by placing them within the broader framework of church-based reconciliation work. Finally, by assessing how successful Church Fora have been in achieving their aims and objectives, I examine the lessons that could be learned for church-based reconciliation work being carried out within Northern Ireland.     

Momentarily immobile: Backpacking,farm work,and hostels in Bundaberg,Australia

The Working Holiday Maker visa encourages young people from 44 nations to live and work for up to three years in Australia, contributing immensely to the temporary migrant workforce in regional areas. However, the conditions they experience while completing 88 days of mandatory ‘farm work’ to apply for visa extensions often place them in vulnerable situations and states of immobility that are counter to the perception of backpackers as mobile. Types of accommodation specifically for temporary migrant farm workers are known as working hostels and in some cases the ways in which they are administered have perpetuated the precarious and immobile situations in which backpackers find themselves. This article explores the lived experiences of backpackers who have undertaken farm work in the Bundaberg region, a new ‘hot spot’ for seasonal migrant labour. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 35 working holiday makers, the article advances the suggestion that recent shifts in hostelling accommodation practices and increased competition for agricultural jobs in the region place individuals in increasingly precarious states of immobility.     

The Political Economy of Unemployment Insurance based on Individual Savings Accounts: Lessons from Chile

In recent years, unemployment protection systems based on individual savings have been instituted in several developing countries. Chile was one of the first to establish such a system, which at the time was widely cited as a model for other countries. This article discusses the particular political context in which the Chilean system was created before examining how it works in terms of coverage and levels of benefits received by unemployed workers. The authors undertake a detailed analysis of the administrative data produced by the system and conclude that the insurance covers only a small proportion of the unemployed, as most workers generally had precarious jobs that did not allow them to contribute to the system consistently. The Chilean case illustrates how difficult it is to establish functioning unemployment insurance in developing countries with precarious labour markets. Based on the interaction between employment characteristics and the conditions imposed by the benefit system, the article assesses the efficacy of the Unemployment Insurance Savings Accounts (UISA) system and analyses whether it can indeed serve as a model for other developing countries.     

Reconstituting Community in Divided Society: Faith-inspired Civil Organizations and the Case of Corrymeela

Abstract

Faith-inspired civil organizations (FICOs) are growing in recognition for their relational and sustainable approaches and contributions to peacebuilding, especially in areas where religious or cultural identities have complicated contexts of violent conflict. The capacity of FICOs to penetrate the deeper and long-term obstacles to peacebuilding is largely a consequence of their underlying faith-based motivations and methods for intervention. This article explores one particular FICO: the Corrymeela Community, which has played a notable public role in the work of peacebuilding and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. In examing the theological roots and operational character of Corrymeela, this article explores possible answers to three important questions. First, as a Christian-inspired organization emphasizing an ecumenical, interfaith approach to sustainable peace, where does Corrymeela locate its theological understanding of violent conflict and purposeful intervention? Second, how does this theological understanding inform and shape its operational strategies for strategic peacebuilding in Northern Ireland? Finally, in a “post-Troubles” Northern Ireland, what is the way forward for such an organization? How might its work and lessons-learned as a FICO continue to impact Northern Ireland, while at the same time contribute to the convoluted work of reconciliation in other regions confronting religiously-fueled violence?     

君家两行十二字 气压邺侯三万签——普林斯顿大学艺术博物馆藏《行穰帖》流传考略

本文通过对《行穰帖》原卷的考察和历代著录的研究,证明《行穰帖》是自北宋宣和内府以来,流传有绪的一件唐代制作的法书影摹本。此外,还澄清了该帖历代刻本、摹本的原委,并解释了乾隆跋语中对董其昌评价的误会。     

African states,citizenship and war: a case–study

This article, first given as a talk to a seminar of the Uganda Parliament in 2000, is a reflection on that aspect of the colonial political legacy that passes for common sense in the region of the African Great Lakes. The author takes a fresh look at recent events leading to civil war in Uganda (1981–6), Rwanda (1990–94) and eastern Congo (1997–.) The article contextualizes three issues: citizenship, civil society and political majorities and minorities as outcomes of the democratic process. To explore how notions of these issues have been changing over the past decade, the author examines the dilemma of a particular cultural group in the Great Lakes region—the Banyarwanda.     

Poster power: rural electrification,visualization, and legibility in the United States

This article examines graphic visualization and visuality in Lester Beall’s 1937 series of posters for the United States Rural Electrification Administration. The posters are commonly thought of as raising public awareness of the benefits of electricity in the rural America, but what was meant by public and awareness in 1937 in terms of rural reform in the United States has remained unclear until now. This article posits that to understand how these posters were seen in 1937 requires an acknowledgment of how Beall’s posters graphically visualized the complexities of rural electrification, and how graphic visualization was contiguous with bureaucratic communication and the visual sensitivity of a public.     

Multi‐scalar Labour Agency in Global Production Networks: Contestation and Crisis in the South African Fruit Sector

Integration into global production networks poses significant challenges, and also opens up opportunities, for labour agency. Governance by lead firms affects working conditions and can drive precarious employment; this interacts with and can constrain national labour legislation covering labour rights. The global production networks (GPN) approach facilitates examination of commercial value chains, their interaction with institutionally and societally embedded labour markets, and potential leverage points for labour contestation transcending local, national and global scales. This informs analysis of commercial/societal articulations as contested processes opening space for multi‐scalar labour agency within global production networks. This article examines how tensions between global commercial and societally embedded dimensions of global production networks drive precarious work, and seeks to understand the implications for emergent forms of multi‐scalar community‐based labour agency. These questions are explored through an examination of labour casualization and contestation in South African fruit production in 2012–13, using the GPN approach. The authors find that multi‐scalar channels of labour agency leveraging both global commercial and government actors can enable reworking by unorganized community‐based labour to bargain for better pay and conditions, but if the underlying global commercial logic is to be challenged, more systemic strategies are required.     

Benedicto Kiwanuka and Catholic Democracy in Uganda

In this article, I introduce Benedicto Kiwanuka (1922–72), Uganda’s first prime minister and most prominent modern Catholic politician, and explore how his religious and political sensibilities — especially his vision of democracy — intersected with Catholic thought and historical experience in Buganda and Uganda. Far from turning him into a “Catholic tribalist” looking to empower Catholics vis à vis other religious groups, Kiwanuka’s Catholic identity was a core component of his political commitment to non-sectarian democracy, the common good, and pan-ethnic nation-building. He saw in Catholicism the possibility of envisioning political solidarity during a moment of social rupture, and he and his Democratic Party used Catholic and biblical discourse and theology to help undergird a broader political commitment to liberal democratic nationalism during Uganda’s transition to independence (1958–62). At the same time, Kiwanuka’s prophetic commitment to principle — an uncompromising dogmatism often expressed in religious and theological language — also helped cost him the opportunity to lead Uganda into and beyond independence.