Platform Workers’ Organizing Diaries: Messages from Union Organizers to Researchers
CASTAC@castac.bsky.social · 17h agoRead and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/08/plat...
Anthropology of Work Review
@anthropologyofwork.bsky.social
Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Work @saw-anthroofwork.bsky.social Editors: @jasminefolz.bsky.social @letha-b.bsky.social @valuequestion.bsky.social
CASTAC@castac.bsky.social · 17h ago
From the SAPIENS.org archive. In the Ecuadorian Amazon, an anthropologist explores how the Shuar people are betting on dragon fruit cultivation to reclaim economic autonomy and political sovereignty. www.sapiens.org/culture/drag...
Cultivating Dragon Fruit’s Political Power in Ecuador
In Ecuador's Amazon, an anthropologist explores how the Shuar are betting on dragon fruit cultivation to reclaim political sovereignty.
sapiens.org
The "just get another job" crowd might be strong lately, but that seems to presume that what's happening at my college isn't happening everywhere in higher education. americananthro.org/anthropology...
Anthropology Watch - American Anthropological Association
Anthropology Watch Program Tracker displaying closures and changes to anthropology programs at universities.
americananthro.org
In our latest issue, @lorenzo-feltrin.bsky.social previews his new book, Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within, from @versobooks.bsky.social 🌎 www.briefecology.com/the-eco-upda...
Book Release | Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within — Brief Ecology
by Lorenzo Feltrin
briefecology.com
China's 'dormitory labour regime' is going global. Comparing SEZs in India and Uganda, Charlotte Goodburn shows how Chinese-inspired industrial zones build gendered workplace–residence systems that discipline migrant women's fertility and daily lives, while externalising the long-term costs.
Reproducing Gendered Labour Control in Special Economic Zones beyond China: The Dormitory Labour Regime in India and Uganda
This essay examines the global reproduction of China’s ‘dormitory labour regime’ (DLR) through a comparative analysis of special economic zones (SEZs). It argues that Chinese-inspired SEZ-based indust...
globalchinapulse.net
Great news! The first episode of Season 3 of our Talk On podcast is now online. In this episode, Jovan Maud speaks with Anna-Lena Wolf about her book Labor on the Line: Justice at Work on Assam Tea Plantations, published by Cornell University Press in 2025. youtu.be/99rGXkWu1M8
Talk On S3E1 | Labor on the Line w/ Anna-Lena Wolf
YouTube video by Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
youtu.be
Thank you W-G! This SI takes the customary use-right of gleaning as a new optic on social life. Gleaning cracks private property open to collectivist claims, to the indeterminate gap where worthless things are still useful. Who gets the remainder? @mpisocialanthro.bsky.social
wennergrenorg.bsky.social@wennergrenorg.bsky.social · 6d agoTime to check out Xenia Cherkaev and Amiel Bize's article, "Who gets the remainder? The ethics and politics of gleaning," in "History and Anthropology." This article is an outgrowth from Cherkaev and Bize's WG funded workshop of the same name. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
See also "Ethnography Under Watch: Field Notes on Student Politics in Indian Universities" Aniruddha Mahajan at @saw-anthroofwork.bsky.social Exertions site: anthrowork.org/intervention...
Ethnography Under Watch: Field Notes on Student Politics in Indian Universities - Society for the Anthropology of Work
In January 2025, it was 2 a.m. at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a public university where student political life increasingly unfolds under surveillance
anthrowork.org
Sociology at Work@sociologyatwork.bsky.social · 7mo ago"A simple query about funding becomes a disciplinary act, reorganising social relations along caste lines." #Sociology PhD student Aniruddha Mahajan on Indian Students in the UK diaspora. doingsociology.org/2... #socialscience
I translated this incredible book by Gonglao 工劳, out this fall with @versobooks.bsky.social
Involution
Involution is the first book to present a detailed account of how the people coming of age in China’s post-miracle moment navigate job searches, exploitation, educational competition, and familial pre...
versobooks.com
The level of detail in photos from this archive is extraordinary. This is Blyvoor Gold Mine around 1953. You can see the prison-like compound for African workers (centre), white tailings dams, uranium plant and Westdene mine housing, later swallowed by a sinkhole.
Duncan Money@mininghistory.bsky.social · last mo.Productive visit to the Mining Industry Archives in Johannesburg last week to look at material on mine accidents.
Just Work. An all new comic about the gig economy, platform capitalism, delivery riders, and their battle for worker rights. You can read a responsive phone/desktop/tablet friendly online version of it - for FREE - here: tomhumberstone.com/just-work
Just Work | Tom Humberstone
Just Work
tomhumberstone.com
Environmental historians of modern China often examine how states transformed landscapes in pursuit of development and ideological visions of remaking nature. In 'Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People', @mmuscolino.bsky.social shifts focus to the people whose labor enabled those transformations.
Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People | Made in China Journal
Environmental historians of modern China have often examined how states transformed landscapes in pursuit of economic development and ideological visions of remaking nature. In Remaking the Earth, Exh...
madeinchinajournal.com
🎉Happy Birthday, Mother Jones! Born #OnThisDay in 1837, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones became one of the fiercest fighters for workers’ rights in U.S. history. A fearless organizer and self-claimed hell-raiser, she inspired miners and their families to stand up against exploitation.
I am also in this faculty and, reader, it shows. UK unis are in their bullshit jobs era now: "In my faculty, six administrators support ten managerial roles at faculty level while another six administrators support departments with their 900 FTE academic staff who teach 10,000 students."
Inside Britain's university crisis
As teaching staff face job loss, their bosses have netted pay rises and bought advice from a “vampiric” management consultancy, writes Prof. John Heathershaw of the University of Exeter
open.substack.com
www.heatwatch.in/blogs/on-cal...
On Call in a Burning City: How Extreme Heat Is Reshaping Women’s Platform Work in Delhi NCR
Thousands of Indians are falling ill and dying of preventable deaths due to extreme heat. Heat Watch is helping expand awareness, capacity, and accountability to facilitate better decision-making and ...
heatwatch.in
Who is going to buy the commodities produced by robots if/when waged work disappears? www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
‘Who is going to pay us when we’re replaced by robots?’ The Indian factory workers told to film themselves for AI
When workers had cameras attached to them, they found it funny at first. But novelty soon turned to concern
theguardian.com
'Protecting Workers? Crisis, COVID-19 and South Asia' brings together a diverse group of scholars and practitioners, spanning #PoliticalScience, #economics, #anthropology, #HumanGeography, #sociology, and #labour activism. The volume is available in #openaccess at: doi.org/10.33134/HUP...
"Students anted to know what their classmates thought rather than what a large language model produced; they wanted to wrestle with difficult readings+complex ideas. They didn’t want to outsource any of this effort to gen AI. They wanted to do the work.” www.insidehighered.com/opinion/care...
Students as Conscientious Objectors to Gen AI (opinion)
We should listen to them—and treat their objections with respect.
insidehighered.com
ECR researching work/labour? Join our community of writing fellows. Deadline for applications: tomorrow!
Anthropology of Work Review@anthropologyofwork.bsky.social · 4w agoIs your current/recent PhD research related to #anthropology of work and #labor? Still time to apply for the @saw-anthroofwork.bsky.social early career/grad student Community of Writing fellows! Deadline August 1st.
@miriamposner.com's SEEING LIKE A SUPPLY CHAIN, out in October from @yalepress.bsky.social, which offers a timely lesson on how capitalism shapes software design--and thus what we can and cannot know about the information (and people) our software rests upon. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300... 5/
Seeing Like a Supply Chain
A history of the technology of supply-chain management from punch cards to neural nets, and how the ambiguity built into that technology helps companies and ...
yalebooks.yale.edu
For non-academic people, this how much UK universities pay publishers to publish their researchers’ articles. The publishers don't pay the researchers, and don't pay the peer reviewers. They also frequently cock up your paper at the typesetting stage. Academic publishing is the worst grift.
Caroline Ball@heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · last wk.Overall data for the UK, by institutional spend. Eye-opening!
Open Access Article from #PracticingAnthropology: Photos from the Migrant Archive: The Experience of Overseas Filipino Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic by Dada Docot doi.org/10.1080/0888... @practicinganthro1.bsky.social @dadadocot.bsky.social #SfAA #anthropology #appliedanthropology
Liquidated, Karen Ho. Like Made in China above this is the objectively correct title for this ethnography. Pure harmony of style and substance in a single word
We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Is, June Nash. 10/10, no notes
The Worst of Anthro Job Ads for 2021 by Dannah Dennis, Dada Docot, Danielle Gendron, and Ilana Gershon anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
<em>American Anthropologist</em> | AAA Anthropology Journal | Wiley Online Library
Click on the article title to read more.
anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Here's an excerpt from my new book in Literary Hub. Remarkably, they chose a section on plantation profits, fetishism, and why enslaved people represented living labor not constant capital. lithub.com/inside-the-p...
Inside the Political Economy of New World Slavery
The “primary purpose” of New World slaves, Sidney Mintz wrote, was to serve as manual laborers engaged…in the production of market commodities…Slaves were not primarily a source of pres…
lithub.com
While climate policy treats nature as a business, pricing ecological damage does not resolve the crisis that markets helped produce. Our book of the week explores how ecological limits become integrated into capitalist accumulation. By Emanuele Leonardi on @versobooks.bsky.social buff.ly/40CBDYV
