Labour geography III: Precarity, racial capitalisms and infrastructure

Abstract

This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity, within geography. After briefly discussing the implications for approaches to agency, I argue for attention to debates about racialized and racial capitalism from labour geographers. I suggest that theorizations of racial capitalism emerge from particular standpoints, and that geographers are well placed to explore racial capitalisms in a plural sense if we are willing to grapple with the standpoints from which we theorize in labour geography itself. I draw on the ‘infrastructural turn’ to illustrate how labour geographers can start to think with relational approaches to racial capitalism.

“Just-in-Place” labor: Driver organizing in the Uber workplace

“…Labor geographers have long examined who controls and establishes the conditions within which people work, how workers resist that control, and why it remains important to do so (Lambert and Herod, 2016;Strauss, 2017Strauss, , 2018Strauss, , 2019. E.P.…”

In the wake of logistics: Situated afterlives of race and labour on the Magdalena River

“…Other scholarship on race and labour in the Black radical tradition (Du Bois, 2007;Johnson, 2017;Kelley, 1996;Robinson, 2000;Roediger, 2007) and in Latin American decolonial thought (Quijano, 2000) also inspired the ideas advanced here, as does the critical work on race and space within the field of Black geographies (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019;Chari, 2008;Gilmore, 2002;Hawthorne, 2019;McKittrick and Woods, 2007). Labour geographers have begun to engage productively with debates about race, capitalism and infrastructure (Strauss, 2020). 3.…”

Revisiting geographies of social reproduction: Everyday life, the endotic, and the infra‐ordinary

“…With a plethora and popularity of writings about infrastructural geographies at present (e.g., Berlant, 2016; Furlong, 2019; Lawhon et al, 2018) – what has also been called an “infrastructural turn” (Amin, 2016, p. 787) – I sense a real opportunity here. In particular, for feminist engagement and expansion of the notion of the “infra‐ordinary” within nascent discussions about social infrastructure (see Hall, 2019; Pearson, 2019; Pearson & Elson, 2015; Strauss, 2019). The term “social infrastructure” has been used to describe a range of interconnected spheres and experiences.…”

“…The term “social infrastructure” has been used to describe a range of interconnected spheres and experiences. These social infrastructures tend to coalesce around social reproduction – though are not explicitly described as such (see Hall, forthcoming) – from everyday tapestries of care‐giving (Hall, 2019) to the provision of state services (Pearson & Elson, 2015; Strauss, 2019). These are the infrastructures that sustain and undergird social lives.…”

“…A feminist interpretation of the infra‐ordinary could, therefore, help in working through the complex “patchwork” in the organisation of childcare and female employment as they impact on gender inequalities in families and society (Breitkreuz et al, 2019, p. 1). It might also bring us closer to the labour‐centred approach to understanding social infrastructures that Strauss (2019) argues for, by focusing on the racialised, gendered, and classed experiences of workers whose labour forms the foundations of social services, processes, and structures of care. In what follows I bring these discussions back to Tivers’ (1978) paper and identify why revisiting geographies social reproduction should be a priority for the discipline.…”