Micro(bial) management: everyday cleanliness and the divisive power of hygienic worries

Abstract

At a major research institution in the American South, cleanliness norms are intensifying for students, housekeepers, and institutional administrators. Whether individual practice, waged labor, or institutional policy concern, daily hygiene routines often refer to invisible or otherwise absent threats to health. Broadly construed as ‘germs’, these include flu, norovirus, and Escherichia coli, as well as dirt, dust mites, allergens, and mold. Their mobilization influences students’ and housekeepers’ interpersonal relations in a range of common university spaces, revealing connections among disease, embodiment, risk, and care. At the same time, concern with germs aligns with institutional efforts to control a historically powerful cadre of workers. Connections between students’ experiences of health and disease risk and housekeeper and institutional orientation to those risks are obscure, although fundamentally constitutive of each other. Analysis of their different, but intersecting ideas about microbial hygienic risk draws together critical geographies of social reproductive labor, cultural geographies of more-than-human agency, and a recent call to elaborate a political ecology of health. Ethnographic and archival data reveal how germs retrench institutional disparities, placing the (re)production of student cleanliness practices and the working lives of housekeepers in tension. For students, germs help shore up valorized subject positions, informing regimes of self-care. For department administrators, a new employee management regime made the potential of microbial threats to student health a scientific instrument of labor control. For housekeepers, germs are particularly evocative of the demand to care for student health by managing exposure to microbial disease risk. Exploring different mobilizations of germs reveals the importance of more-than-human life to systems of and divisions between social reproductive labor regimes on campus.

Desirable futures: Time as possibility, practice, politics

“…Settler-enslaver epistemologies figure land and people as “potential property to further the interests of capital, state-making, and whiteness” (Curley et al., 2022: 4; Lowe, 2015); time too falls into the sights of this property-making colonial metaphysics. Time is a strategy used by the state and capital to discipline, coerce, and frame what is possible – from the management of minutes or even seconds in the workplace (Dimpfl, 2018), to the inscription of dominant time into the law (Joshi, 2023; Mills, 2014), from the structure of checkpoints and prisons which control and restructure time (Tawil-Souri, 2017), to the management of how we think of epochs, eras, or the future (Curley and Smith, forthcoming; Fagan, 2019; Whyte, 2021). Barra (2024) begins her article on “restoration otherwise,” quoting Louisiana officials saying, “We have no time left to lose.” This seemingly protective urgency justifies the abandonment of the Black, Indigenous, southeast Asian, and low-income communities affected (Barra, 2024: 2).…”

Cosmopolitan sidestep: University life, intimate geopolitics and the hidden costs of “Global” citizenship

“…The report gives quantitative measure to de facto linguistic, racial and ethnic segregation. These divisions were reinforced by a work management system that required housekeepers to abandon long‐held work posts for tightly controlled shifts focused on “specialised” work practice (Dimpfl, ), marking an institutional turn to “scientific management” impacting the janitorial science industry more broadly (cf. Agular, ).…”

Geographies of citizenship in higher education: An introduction

“…Second, we need more critical analyses of the contradictions that percolate young people's citizenship performances in and through higher education. Although universities and colleges provide the spaces, times and resources for students to develop multicultural, cosmopolitan and political citizenships, these ostensibly positive enactments may exist alongside or even mask gendered, racialised and classed power structures operating stealthily within other sites tied to the lives of students and those actors who co‐produce the higher education experience (see also Dimpfl, ), such that there is considerable ambiguity to how citizenship in higher education is being produced and consumed. Third, the omitted discussion of the relationship between citizenship and older students in higher education within this collection signals the need for more scholarly attention on this topic.…”