This article examines the experiences of immigrant Latina domestic workers on care work platforms, arguing that these technologies extend historical norms of domesticity into the digital era through algorithmic bias, visibility regimes, and quantification. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with fifteen workers in Los Angeles alongside platform analysis, it introduces the framework of familiar interfaces to show how user interfaces and the data that shape them rely on historically sedimented racialized and gendered scripts of domesticity. Using co-research methods, the article centers workers' stories and situated knowledge to illuminate how they navigate, perform, and contest opaque algorithmic systems. By situating platform-mediated care work within longer histories of racialized, gendered, and migratory domestic labor, this study contributes to scholarship on labor and technology while reorienting analyses of the so-called gig economy away from androcentric, public-facing sectors like ride-hailing and delivery, and toward the historically feminized, racialized, and immigrant labor of domestic work.
This article examines positive dimensions of emotional labor through ethnographic fieldwork on paid online companionship in China's pei liao industry. We argue that dominant concepts in emotional labor research outside anthropology have limited the extent to which emotional labor's brighter possibilities can be recognized-specifically, by framing it as inherently self-deceptive, overlooking workers' interactional skill in shaping encounters, and relying on static models of the self. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews with pei liao workers, we address these limitations by introducing "identity positioning" as both an analytic concept and an observed interactional strategy. Identity positioning refers to the deliberate selection and foregrounding of role-, group-, and trait-based identities that are already meaningful to workers, rather than the suppression or reworking of inner feelings, as a means of building rapport with clients. We then show that identity positioning's positive outcomes may arise through two pathways: it can enable workers to engage and develop identities that are acknowledged yet underdeveloped in their repertoire, and to elaborate already salient identities into distinct variants through interactions with different clients.
This article is part of the special issue, Racialization and The Gig Economy, Anthropology of Work Review 47 (1), June 2026, edited by Shreya Subramani and Christien Tompkins. This article explores the expansion of school busing systems in the aftermath of New Orleans' unprecedented conversion of all public schools to privately managed charter schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The charter system strikingly moved from neighborhood schools to schools of choice, forcing the primarily black and low-income student body to commute twice as long to school across an increasingly fractured racial landscape. The article argues that the school bus and the students themselves have become racializing infrastructures and that the mobility labor of these students is both reflective of larger transformations in gig economies and, in its spatial and racial dimensions, has turned their access to schooling into a form of gig work. Like gig workers, students are increasingly forced to circulate between urban core and periphery in service of both their own entrepreneurial and economic ambitions but also in service of larger ideological projects of choice and a market model of society-movements with hidden social and economic costs and unjust burdens.
This article is part of the special issue "Racialization and the gig economy", Anthropology of Work Review 47(1), June 2026, edited by Shreya Subramani and Christien Tompkins. Amidst the economic precarity exacerbated by neoliberal policies of the 20th century, Jamaican women look beyond the island's shores to find financial stability. Beyond this, these women embrace the move to indulge in a creative process of self-growth and development. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with Black Jamaican women employed as English-language instructors in Japan, this article focuses on the mechanisms that set the stage for South-East migratory circuits from the Caribbean to Asia. In this practice of transcontinental "gig work," Black Jamaican women navigate racialized and gendered regimes of value to access markets for their linguistic expertise as native speakers of English. Intervening in scholarship on seasonal migrant labor and neoliberal precarity, I discuss the ways that migration functions as an option for economic stability in a landscape of scarce employment. To this end, I incorporate Bianca Williams' study of Black American women who travel to find happiness in Jamaica and Jonathan Rosa's work on raciolinguistics to address the ways Jamaican women experience and observe language, race, and ethnic categorization in Japan. From this discussion, Japan emerges as a site of discovery, encounter, and struggle in contemporary gig economies. Here, women question their larger life goals, stake claims to a more fulfilling work-life experience, and negotiate different versions of themselves.
This article is part of the special issue 'Racialization and The Gig Economy' (AWR July 2026; 47(1)) edited by Shreya Subramani and Christien Tompkins. This article examines how Ethiopian women distance runners labor within-and reveal the contradictions of-the global running economy. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in Ethiopia, Europe, and the United States, I analyze how athletes navigate two intertwined value circuits: the mass consumer markets of the Global North, where running shoes become lucrative lifestyle commodities, and the elite competitive circuit, where a small number of East African athletes generate the spectacular performances that confer value on those commodities. Through attention to everyday struggles over access to "super shoes," contract negotiations, prize structures, and the social life of footwear, I show how Ethiopian athletes' labor forms a hidden abode of production that is indispensable yet structurally obscured. Racialized discourses of "marketability," gendered hierarchies of visibility, and the fetishization of African "natural ability" shape how value is extracted from athletes while limiting their ability to realize it as income, mobility, or security. By centering women's critiques, misapprehensions, and aspirations, the article demonstrates how gig-like athletic labor in the transnational running economy is simultaneously empowering and precarious, illuminating broader dynamics of racial capitalism, technological change, and global inequality.
Being a bus operator has long meant access to middle class wages, quality benefits, and union membership, forms of security increasingly rare amid growing precarity. But transit is in trouble. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and decades of disinvestment, bus operators face mounting time pressure, frequent violence, and eroding job security. They are framed as inefficient, a narrative used to justify weakening their labor protections and degrading dignity on the job. We highlight the on-the-ground effects of this racialized devaluation through first-hand accounts from bus operators across the U.S. and Canada. Their embodied critique of the current crisis makes visible the harms of neoliberal transformations, including emerging technological change. A driverless future is being advanced, one that would further degrade bus operators' dignity and devalue their labor. We introduce the concept of neoliberal automation to describe this trajectory and describe how it is being contested. Transit workers are rejecting automation framed by austerity and displacement, offering instead visions of a labor future centered on dignity, safety, and democratic control over technological change.
This paper analyzes the content of India's digital self‐help gurus (SHGs), who are popular online figures in India, and engages a varied online audience across multiple social media platforms. We examine the role that the digital SHGs play to mediate cultural transformation following economic restructuring of the Indian economy that began in the 1990s and rapidly transformed the socioeconomic landscape. There was a shift to contractual and uncertain employment, and a simultaneous valorization of entrepreneurial citizenship. We propose that the digital SHGs facilitate this transformation by undertaking the work of mourning and the work of dreaming. Through their advice and content, they enable a letting go of the values historically attached with higher education and stable employment and help cultivate new attitudes toward skill accumulation, self‐audit, and responsibilization—core tenets of enterprise culture—to posit entrepreneurial citizenship as a desirable goal. However, entrepreneurial citizenship can be exclusionary and offer unstable belonging. The digital SHGs assuage these fears and anxieties by normalizing failure and prescribing perseverance to cultivate the entrepreneurial self.
This article is part of the special issue Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work, Anthropology of Work Review 46(1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. How do the tools and processes of disability assessment fragment, quantify, and measure bodies, body parts, and physical capacities? How do these medical and legal forms of compartmentalization translate physical capacity into a bioeconomically standardized ability to work, which I call “bodyworkability”? I explore these questions by focusing on coal miners' medical and labor experiences in the Soma Basin, Turkey. Bodyworkability describes the medico-legal substitution of body parts—limbs, muscles, bones, organs, tissues, nerves—with quantified units of standardized ability to work. The concept illuminates the distinction between physical capacity and the ability to perform specific types of work, enhancing understandings of both labor power and disability. The article centers on two disability assessment tools: the Table of Percentages of Handicap [ Özür Oranları Cetveli ]—or Barema, as used by the Council of Europe—and Balthazard's Formula/Index, used for individuals with multiple disabling conditions. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the concept of bodyworkability emerges from the lived experiences of miners who are injured, maimed, or diagnosed with occupational illnesses due to work accidents, disasters, and toxicity, and who struggle to obtain official disability recognition.
This article explores how value is generated in the Portuguese call centre sector by examining its reliance on the commodification of socially and historically rooted reproductive capacities. Previous research on call centres has often focused on the disembedding, disembodiment, depersonalisation, and desubjectification of human linguistic agency, frequently neglecting the familial, educational, and moral infrastructures that make labour power both viable and exploitable. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the extraction of value in this sector relies not only on linguistic output or emotional labour but also on historically embedded reproductive capacities, such as empathy, ethical judgment, and communicative skills. These capacities are shaped by intergenerational efforts aimed at social mobility and national modernisation. These reproductive investments, which are developed outside the wage relationship, are appropriated by capital through a labour regime that requires personalisation while enforcing standardisation. By integrating social reproduction theory with call centre studies, this article reframes call centres as critical sites where the tensions between production and reproduction become evident, contested, and productive of surplus value.
This article explores the aspirations for digital work among two seemingly disparate groups: Lao rural-urban migrant youth and Western digital nomads. Based on ethnographic research in Laos and Thailand, we argue that despite differing socioeconomic backgrounds, both groups share strikingly similar aspirations for autonomy and self-reliance through online work. This challenges existing theories that emphasize the local context of aspirations, suggesting that global connections and neoliberal values increasingly shape desires for a "good life" centered on digital labor. We analyze how these aspirations are formed through encounters with digital technologies, online communities, and global narratives of success, highlighting the role of the internet as both a source of inspiration and a means of achieving these goals. By examining these convergent aspirations, we advance the understanding of how global connections influence the formation and expression of aspiration in the digital age. These findings highlight the importance of exploring the complex interplay between individual aspirations, global connections, and evolving notions of digital work.
South Carolina's Black Belt counties are perennial targets of economic development programs. Economic development personnel focus on industrial recruitment and workforce development to remedy the economic woes of the region. They advertise an available, non-union workforce and free workforce training programs for industries considering locating in South Carolina. These training programs emphasize "soft skills," a term used by employers, economic development personnel, and workforce development agencies to refer to traits or behaviors an employer desires in a worker, but that are not directly related to a specific job. This research situates the neoliberal turn towards "soft skills" in its historical context in the U.S. South. I draw on Clyde Woods' concept of "moral micromanagement" strategies to compare 20th-century industrial education and 21st-century soft skills training programs, demonstrating that soft skills training programs represent a continuity of racial ideologies and racialized labor regimes. Placing soft skills training within a longer history of moral micromanagement indicates that labor management practices associated with soft skills have as much to do with old ways of disciplining labor as new and highlights the co-constitution of labor anxiety and racial ideologies.
This article explores how value is generated in the Portuguese call centre sector by examining its reliance on the commodification of socially and historically rooted reproductive capacities. Previous research on call centres has often focused on the disembedding, disembodiment, depersonalisation, and desubjectification of human linguistic agency, frequently neglecting the familial, educational, and moral infrastructures that make labour power both viable and exploitable. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the extraction of value in this sector relies not only on linguistic output or emotional labour but also on historically embedded reproductive capacities, such as empathy, ethical judgment, and communicative skills. These capacities are shaped by intergenerational efforts aimed at social mobility and national modernisation. These reproductive investments, which are developed outside the wage relationship, are appropriated by capital through a labour regime that requires personalisation while enforcing standardisation. By integrating social reproduction theory with call centre studies, this article reframes call centres as critical sites where the tensions between production and reproduction become evident, contested, and productive of surplus value.
The promise of knowledge society is clean, creative, and expressive work. Technological advancements would relieve humans from the tedium and hardship of labor, and access to knowledge and expansion of higher education would diminish the existing social inequalities of industrial society. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Switzerland's mechanical and electrical engineering industry, this article illustrates how the work experiences of apprentices challenge the image of labor in a knowledge society ostensibly freed from all forms of material, technological, and social constraint. I demonstrate that the persistence of the tedium and potential danger of industrial work, of organizational hierarchies, the decreasing social validation of mechanical and manual labor, and expectations and aspirations to singularity make youth increasingly interested in other kinds of employment and training. The article takes the work and learning relations in the Swiss mechanical and electrical engineering sector as a symptom of emerging tensions around the division of labor and valorization of different forms of skills, and the meaning and motivations of work in late capitalism. I argue that future anthropological studies of work and education in de-industrialized settings might do well to examine the social critique of industrial work in concert with its aesthetic critique.
This article draws on digital ethnographic fieldwork to examine how the pandemic-induced shift to remote work prompted workers at a London tech start-up to engage in ethical reflections on their new work-life arrangements. Workers imagined becoming a more "balanced" worker-autonomous but connected, productive but not burnt out, balanced but still committed-capable of investing their time and energy into both their professional and personal lives. Yet as time passed, aspirations to cultivate a balanced self clashed with emerging ambiguities about what counts as "real work" and "procrastination" when working from home. As everyday rhythms were reconfigured, the absence of office-based social cues revealed the collective, relational maintenance work that underpins temporal order, workplace presence, and a sense of balance for workers. By tracing workers' struggles and efforts to cultivate balance, this article contributes to debates on the social dynamics and moral contradictions of remote work in a post-pandemic context.
The work of migrants and transborder commuters in rural and peripheralized localities is often considered invisible or, in fact, actively ignored. This multimodal essay reflects on transborder lifeworlds in the Polish-German border region, drawing on insights from using photography and sound recording as a research method. In the hands of anthropologists and sociologists of work, these methods can be powerful tools for foregrounding intersecting lifeworlds, hidden hierarchies, and power dynamics that shape the places under study. Engaging with both visual and auditory dimensions enables researchers to re-visit their observations and share them with others, opening up new perspectives and re-interpretations, transcending what may have escaped attention or what they perceive differently because of their positionality. Through the curated photographs and soundscapes, this essay offers an intimate, sensorial engagement with everyday life that extends beyond words. Paying attention to crossing, interacting, and overlapping border-zone lifeworlds is essential not only for the study of local context but also for mobility and migration scholarship focusing on labor mobilities to rural and peripheralized regions and the in/visible power relations tied to broader global systems.
This article is part of the special issue "Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work" (AWR July 2025; 46(1)) edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. Neutrality, epitomized as Whiteness, confers privileges that hinge on being neurotypical, equating neutrality with both Whiteness and the perception of normalcy. For individuals who are both autistic and non-White, navigating this construct often means enduring intersecting forms of oppression. This article examines these dynamics through the personal narratives of a Black neurotypical woman and an autistic Latina in the workplace. Drawing on Critical Racial Studies, Critical Autism Studies, Whiteness Studies, and ethnographic research, we highlight the urgent need for collaboration across these fields. To advance this effort, we introduce the term neuroaquilombar, representing a deliberate approach to cultivating collective spaces that affirm cultural identity for Black and non-White populations while embracing neurological diversity as a natural aspect of humanity. Through collaborative autoethnography as escreviv & ecirc;ncias, we reflect on the challenges of conforming to capitalist productivity standards in a society structured for the success of the White, able-bodied majority. By recounting our workplace experiences, we aim to deepen understanding, foster connections that humanize diverse experiences, and issue a call to action for advocates in both spheres. Additionally, we seek to showcase new forms of engagement that transcend the extractive practices often associated with anthropological research conducted by non-disabled White scholars.
This article is part of the special issue Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work, Anthropology of Work Review 46(1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. How do the tools and processes of disability assessment fragment, quantify, and measure bodies, body parts, and physical capacities? How do these medical and legal forms of compartmentalization translate physical capacity into a bioeconomically standardized ability to work, which I call "bodyworkability"? I explore these questions by focusing on coal miners' medical and labor experiences in the Soma Basin, Turkey. Bodyworkability describes the medico-legal substitution of body parts-limbs, muscles, bones, organs, tissues, nerves-with quantified units of standardized ability to work. The concept illuminates the distinction between physical capacity and the ability to perform specific types of work, enhancing understandings of both labor power and disability. The article centers on two disability assessment tools: the Table of Percentages of Handicap [& Ouml;z & uuml;r Oranlar & imath; Cetveli]-or Barema, as used by the Council of Europe-and Balthazard's Formula/Index, used for individuals with multiple disabling conditions. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the concept of bodyworkability emerges from the lived experiences of miners who are injured, maimed, or diagnosed with occupational illnesses due to work accidents, disasters, and toxicity, and who struggle to obtain official disability recognition.
This paper analyzes the content of India's digital self-help gurus (SHGs), who are popular online figures in India, and engages a varied online audience across multiple social media platforms. We examine the role that the digital SHGs play to mediate cultural transformation following economic restructuring of the Indian economy that began in the 1990s and rapidly transformed the socioeconomic landscape. There was a shift to contractual and uncertain employment, and a simultaneous valorization of entrepreneurial citizenship. We propose that the digital SHGs facilitate this transformation by undertaking the work of mourning and the work of dreaming. Through their advice and content, they enable a letting go of the values historically attached with higher education and stable employment and help cultivate new attitudes toward skill accumulation, self-audit, and responsibilization-core tenets of enterprise culture-to posit entrepreneurial citizenship as a desirable goal. However, entrepreneurial citizenship can be exclusionary and offer unstable belonging. The digital SHGs assuage these fears and anxieties by normalizing failure and prescribing perseverance to cultivate the entrepreneurial self.
The transition to industrial regimes has produced new categories of people deemed “unfit” for labor. Even if these boundaries are more porous nowadays, contributions to this Special Issue reveal continuities in how people struggle for a place in domains of work that are ill‐shaped to accommodate their diverse bodyminds. Drawing on disability/chronicity cases from India, Germany, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil/Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States, authors in this issue study how people navigate and reshape the boundaries between labor, care, and recognition. Based on these insights, this introduction calls for scholarly engagement with visions of work as they emerge from what Faye Harrison calls ex‐centric sites, i.e., viewing the margins of normative labor regimes as analytical loci for knowledge creation. We consider work not only in the context of how capitalist and biomedical systems produce debilitation and moral distinction but also as a transformative sphere, irreducible to predominant categories of employment and productivity. Bridging between medical/disability anthropology, critical disability studies, and the anthropology of work, we call for an expansive understanding of work and theory‐building from neglected positionings within labor economies.
