Tuesday 24 October 2023 5:30pm to 6:30pm
Edmund Leach room, Department of Social Anthropology
About
Professor Sian Lazar
How We Struggle. A Political Anthropology of Labour
How We Struggle. A Political Anthropology of Labour
When it comes to labour movements, unionised industrial workers on the factory floor have only ever been part of the picture. Across so many different workplaces, sectors of the economy and geographical contexts, the question of how working people struggle in the day-to-day has no single answer.
Sian Lazar offers a unique anthropological perspective on labour agency that takes in examples from across the globe, from heavy industry and agriculture, to the service and informal sectors. She asks: how do people strive to improve their lives and working conditions? How are they constrained and enabled in that struggle by the nature of the work they do, and by their own positionality in local histories, cultures and networks?
How We Struggle explores worker action across the spectrum from organised trade unionism to individualised strategies of accommodation, resistance and escape. The book marries a discussion of global political economy and Marxist feminist theories of labour with ethnographic approaches that begin from a perspective of human experience, kinship and radical heterogeneity.
Sian Lazar, Professor of Social Anthropology, works on collective politics, especially labour unions, with an emphasis on Argentina and Bolivia.
Optional reading: the book can be found here: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=7130357 (for Cambridge students)