Dr Dolores Señorans

I am a social anthropologist interested in the study of collective politics and precarious labour in Latin America. For my doctoral thesis (UBA-EHESS, 2018) I did over 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork with the activists and workers that came together to create a novel union that represents unwaged workers in Argentina: The Confederation of Workers of the Popular Economy (CTEP). I have studied their every-day practices of organisation and their relationship with state bureaucracies focusing on how they demand and produce rights based on notions of what constitutes a life with dignity. As part of the research group Antropología en Colabor based at the University of Buenos Aires, I have also explored collaborative research methodologies with social movements and labour organisations. During 2020 I worked for the Government of Argentina in the design and implementation of public policies for worker cooperatives. 

My current research funded by the British Academy through a Newton International Fellowship will address the unwaged garment sector workers’ union organisation in Argentina, examining the experience of urban dispossession and labour exploitation in the garment manufacturing industry to understand how these experiences model workers’ forms of political organisation. In Argentina, garment production is predominantly outsourced to small family sweatshops run by migrant workers and located in shantytowns in the City of Buenos Aires or settlements created after land occupations in its periphery. I am interested in assessing the intersections between popular urbanisation, outsourced commodity production and collective labour politics in the city. By doing so, I seek to bring together two contemporary debates in social sciences: the conceptualisations of precarity and urban citizenship in Latin America