ABSTRACT This article is part of the special issue 'Morality at Work: Ethnographies of Labor and Ethics' edited by Michael Vine and Sarah Winkler‐Reid. This article explores how future‐oriented temporalities shape people's labor experiences and ethical subjectivities within the global supply chain of brown shrimp. Drawing on ethnographic research with Dutch fishers, Moroccan shrimp peelers, and European processing managers, it traces how embedded notions of risk, luck, and destiny mediate workers' engagement with the uncertainty of the future. Processing company managers in Europe employ risk management practices to assert control over volatile markets, while North Sea fishers rely on notions of luck to navigate the unpredictability of fishing. In Moroccan peeling factories, workers often invoke destiny when making sense of their precarious working conditions. This article argues that attention to these divergent orientations toward the future offers critical insight into the moral economies that drive different forms of work under global capitalism.
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.
