Notes from the editorial collective

Abstract

Reflecting on the life of the work contract during the pandemic, Ilana Gershon writes, “People began to think about the constraints and compromises they had accepted by working and began to wonder if they wanted to continue accepting these compromises. They began to dabble in imagining life otherwise and also often evaluated anew the reasons they were working in the first place, and what obligations should accompany their commitment to work” (2021, p. 62). Now more than ever, as United Auto Workers (UAW)'s workers strike in Michigan and the Writers' Guild of America (WGA) calls an end to their 148-day strike in Los Angeles and New York, we are heartened by the timely focus of the articles in this issue that center workers' experiences and more deeply examine the contracts of obligation they negotiate and commit to.

On a more personal note, this issue closes out 2023 at a critical juncture for us as co-editors of AWR. Quite significantly, we are publishing in a period of ongoing concern and uncertainty with respect to the distribution of publishing and editorial labor in the American Anthropological Association (AAA). As evidenced in the call for solidarity and transparency from our colleagues (Downey, 2023), our editorial working conditions have encouraged difficult discussions across the AAA journal portfolio around the roles we should play and the obligations we can and should honor in the complicated landscape of revenue-driven, academic publishing. Through these discussions, we have learned how singularly dedicated our fellow editors are to increasing and opening access to scientific knowledge, to supporting and developing the publishing careers of junior and early-career scholars, and to expanding and diversifying the capacities for scholarly authorship in the discipline.

As co-editors of AWR, we hold quite passionately to these ideas and are proud that this issue is an exemplar of these collective commitments. All five authors in this issue are early-career scholars. Each article has developed through iterations of careful and generous peer review and purposeful exchanges of developmental editing between authors and editors. Through this dialogic revision process, we had the opportunity to meet and talk directly to many of our authors. We work in an environment where editors are increasingly hidden and disembodied behind large digital portals, and early-career authors are alienated from infrastructural forms of mentoring and collectivity in their writing. Face-to-face author–editor relationships that at once center the author's research experience and challenge their thinking work best in the social, mutual, and intellectual infrastructures of support they provide. This is what we have encouraged here and in all other issues of AWR, and we would like all our prospective authors to know this as they consider submitting to our journal.

Collectively, these articles interrogate worker devaluation and mobility. Each author traces how worker devaluation operates across intersections of race, disability, location, class, and gender. By centering the variegated experiences of workers, our authors make visible the complex and discomforting global and locally-invested systems of capital extraction, materiality, and alienation. In doing so, they present compelling and necessary anthropological evidence that confirms why and how workers are devalued and the modes of survival and collective struggle they employ in their work.

Ramsha Usman, whose article was the winner of the 2021 Eric R. Wolf Prize,¹ examines the work experiences of two disabled Pakistani web designers, one in Karachi, Pakistan, and the other, a PhD student and software engineer in Silicon Valley. For Usman, the mediated, nonplace of the virtual world allows for imagining new subjectivities and their subsequent embedding in software design. Jennifer Cook writes about Black and Latinx farmworkers in rural Connecticut; conducting ethnographic research on three different farms, she tracks how differentiated racial hierarchies and visa regimes shape the socialities and possibilities of work under predominantly white-owned and white employer-managed farms in New England. Salvador Zárate writes about LatinX gardeners working in Orange County in suburban California, showing readers how the suburban landscape and its toxicities coupled with racialized intimacy exacerbate epidemiological risk. Situated in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he reads this precarious survival through the metaphor of breath and breathing to disrupt the smooth acceptance of gardeners' devaluation. Sonja Faaren Rudd writes about personnel d'accompagnement de train railway accompaniment personnel or (PATs) in Luxembourg and argues that labor's value and devaluation are produced and contested in the shifts between the work of transport governance and the work of service and care. Souvanik Mallik writes about auto-rickshaw drivers in the megacity of Delhi, India, demonstrating how transport work animates many other forms of labor required to navigate the formal legal, bureaucratic, and political spheres.

Each article brings readers to the very heart of the anthropology of work by resolutely centering workers and entering their worlds; they focus on the distinct spatial-materialities that accompany work and how those dimensions are vital to how workers make, perceive, change, and survive their conditions. At the same time, each author reminds us that workers everywhere are integral to broader, social, material, environmental, and object landscapes. They are surrounded by plants, environmental toxins, food, tobacco, computer codes, tickets, trains, auto-rickshaws, and legal documents. These materials are tools of labor and work but also connective, shaping forces of social, political, and ecological life.

Alongside those tools, these articles ground and deeply commit to ethnographically identifying and theorizing worker devaluation and the contracts they must negotiate. In this moment, when calls for worker solidarity remain critical, the words and the worlds they assemble give us hope amidst exploitation, crisis, and the inevitable breakdown of contracts. The impulse for “imagining life otherwise” in an ecosystem that remains entrenched in extraction remains. To those that urgently imagine with us, thank you. We also thank our generous reviewers for their feedback and careful engagement with these articles, our editorial board for their valued input and engagement, and lastly our readers.