29 Jun 2022 - 1 Jul 2022

Description

Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK;
29 June – 1st July 2022
Organizer: Katarzyna Cieslik
Co-organizers: Anna Barford, Grace Mueller, and Kate Brockie

(detailed program and stream description available here: https://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/decentwork/events/)

The contemporary trends in global labour demonstrate that today’s world of work is fraught with fragility and vulnerability. The gradually shrinking proportion of waged employees remains concentrated in the so-called Global North while workers in the Global South suffer from precarious employment, informal employment and underemployment. The recent Covid-19 pandemic made these differences even more pronounced: the nature of global capital accumulation and labour absorption regimes, combined with the highly sectoral nature of socio-economic impacts of the recession, meant that some workers have shouldered the bulk of the burden more than others.

As policy makers around the globe deliberate the socio economic-recovery plans, we take the crisis as an opportunity to pause and reflect: what processes have been driving these long-standing inequalities? How have they been experienced by the workers? How have they manifested at individual, institutional and global levels? Can the crisis become an opportunity for systemic transformation?

We look at ‘Environment’, ‘Technology‘, ‘Gender‘ and ‘Education‘ as strategic areas of both concern and opportunity. We seek contributions that describe, analyse and question the ways in which work and labour have been conceptualised to date. The objective is to re-evaluate the current theorizations and approaches and to design new analytical frameworks that can support, fuel and advance the global transformation of work. We invite both conceptual and empirical papers that consider a critical perspective within these following broad thematic areas, focusing specifically on people, processes and spaces in the Global South.

Social Science Research for the 21st Century - Progress through Partnership

Email: philomathia@admin.cam.ac.uk