Research into the world of work has been reanimated by the Covid19 pandemic, rapid advancement of digital technologies, increased informalisation and precarisation of work around the world, and more broadly mass wagelessness. Feminist scholars have highlighted the significance of the frame of ‘social reproduction’ – the work of sustaining life on an everyday basis, as well as generationally – to understand how people are navigating, responding to, and resisting these conditions characteristic of neoliberal globalisation. Drawing inspiration from these interventions, we invite contributions for a one-day workshop from scholars who use ethnographic research to explore the intersection of gender, work, and subjectivity, specifically in South Asia. We understand ‘work’ as an expansive category, encompassing varied types of employment as well as the labour of life-making, and indeed the relationship between these. We see ‘gender’ both as a significant analytic that pushes us to consider work as this expansive category, and as a social relation that shapes and is shaped by work. We focus on ‘subjectivities’ to engage with the everyday experiences of – being subjected to as well as desiring – socio- economic transformations. We hope that ethnographic research located in varied South Asian contexts will animate in-depth insights into gender, work, and
subjectivity.

Read the full description of the workshop here