Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

This article is part of the special issue “Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work” (title of SI; AWR July 2025; 46(1)) edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. This paper examines the experiences of work and unemployment among residents of an East London borough living with multiple long-term health conditions. Through ethnographic research, we explore the psychopolitics of unemployment in an urban setting, focusing on the cyclical relationship between (un)employment and (ill-)health. Our findings show the double bind participants often experience regarding work: while they desired employment and could only imagine a fulfilling life through work, they found it impossible to remain in most workplaces they had experienced, as these environments worsened their health conditions. This contradiction created a sense of existential stuckness among our study participants. Additionally, our analysis highlights the moral and bureaucratic challenges involved in managing unemployment. The benefit assessment process, combined with social isolation, often reinforced a chronic identity among long-term unemployed participants, leading to a diminished sense of their own capabilities. By theorizing the seduction of labor in contemporary societies as a distinct form of psychopolitics inherent to neoliberal governance, we aim to highlight the troubling pressure governments place on individuals to work, even under conditions of long-term illness.

This article is part of the special issue Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work, Anthropology of Work Review 46(1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. How do the tools and processes of disability assessment fragment, quantify, and measure bodies, body parts, and physical capacities? How do these medical and legal forms of compartmentalization translate physical capacity into a bioeconomically standardized ability to work, which I call “bodyworkability”? I explore these questions by focusing on coal miners' medical and labor experiences in the Soma Basin, Turkey. Bodyworkability describes the medico-legal substitution of body parts—limbs, muscles, bones, organs, tissues, nerves—with quantified units of standardized ability to work. The concept illuminates the distinction between physical capacity and the ability to perform specific types of work, enhancing understandings of both labor power and disability. The article centers on two disability assessment tools: the Table of Percentages of Handicap [Özür Oranları Cetveli]—or Barema, as used by the Council of Europe—and Balthazard's Formula/Index, used for individuals with multiple disabling conditions. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the concept of bodyworkability emerges from the lived experiences of miners who are injured, maimed, or diagnosed with occupational illnesses due to work accidents, disasters, and toxicity, and who struggle to obtain official disability recognition.

This article is part of the special issue Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work, Anthropology of Work Review 46(1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. Over the last century, indigenous rurality in Mexico has undergone profound sociocultural and economic transformations. Peasant activities have declined, racialized forms of employment have emerged, and chronic conditions have skyrocketed, mirrored in the increasing numbers of people living with disabilities and for longer time spans. In such a context, disability and masculinity are simultaneously active shapers of spaces and embodiments of larger corpospatial transformations. Focusing on the work/disability experiences of three indigenous men of rural origin, we explore how being at work despite physical restrictions implies a rearrangement of how the body inhabits space and relates to working objects, including those which are culturally considered more “feminine.” By employing the concept “corpospatiality” we depict a set of dynamics that interlink gendered bodies, spaces, and objects in sociohistorically shaped fields. We understand these work/disability corpospatial (re)configurations as individual and collective responses to the conflict caused by shrinking environments due to disability. The intersection of disability and “work”—a mediating and transforming activity between humans and their surroundings—constitutes a privileged locus to think about changing masculinities.

This article is part of the special issue Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity, and Work, Anthropology of Work Review 46 (1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. This paper examines how Delhi's air pollution crisis and its compounding impacts on residents' health disrupt normative ideas of work, generating a new hierarchy of values that centers the ability to breathe freely. Based on ethnographic research with two virtual activist groups, this study traces how white-collar professionals engage in labor-related activism that, while limited in scope, carries the emancipatory potential to subvert dominant preferences within late capitalist structures in the Global South. My interlocutors navigate shared challenges brought on by exposure to pollutants, including breathlessness, fatigue, asthma, headaches—ailments that have become chronic, recurring with the rise of pollution levels. Drawing on the anthropology of work and environmental anthropology, this paper shows how impaired bodies become an extension of the toxic landscape, and how the embodied experience of work leads to the desire to breathe freely through a reimagining of economic participation, as individuals seek alternative professional trajectories, advocate for workplace adaptations, and, in some cases, relocate in pursuit of cleaner environments. As my interlocutors find themselves reordering perceived values at work, it reveals how chronicity and crisis can disrupt normative economic practice and create distinct visions of a good life.

Equine therapy is a highly adaptable form of therapy, which has been shown to benefit people living with physical, cognitive, and emotional challenges and disabilities. At an equine therapy program in Eastern Pennsylvania, which I call “True Hearts,” children and adults with documented disabilities learn to ride horses as a tool for sharpening neurological functioning in cognition, body movement, organization, and attention levels to strengthen these functions off the horse, in their daily lives. An element of “daily lives” off the farm includes preparedness at school and towards possible employment opportunities. The question of employment animates this article: for therapy riders at True Hearts, employment opportunities, linked to both potential self-sufficiency and also a sense of self-worth, are available on the farm. This article asks what this employment looks like in practice and argues that such opportunities come at a cost for the full-time care workers at True Hearts, who erode their own health and wellbeing in service of their students. Throughout, I argue that workspaces cannot save us, in terms of any liberatory potential under capitalism. And yet, we still try, moving always in the direction of this horizon of possibility.