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Society for the Anthropology of Work
Welcome
The Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) is a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Our goal is to advance the study of work, in the broadest sense, and to communicate that knowledge to the world.
SAW is committed to centering the contributions of scholars of color and to advancing an antiracist, decolonial anthropology of work. Stay tuned for information about SAW’s activities at the 2023 AAA/CASCA annual meeting.
Announcements
Published: Aug 29, 2023
A regularly updated list of books for review in Exertions.
Published: Oct 03, 2023
The meeting will take place in the Boston area, on the campus of Tufts University, on April 18–20, 2024.
Published: Jul 25, 2023
Submissions are due on September 15 the Eric R. Wolf Prize. This prize honors excellence in graduate student research on the topic of the anthropology of work.
Published: Jun 07, 2023
This special issue for the Anthropology of Work Review (AWR) intends to shed light on how people navigate disabling, chronic, debilitating and/or enabling experiences in and through work, and how these experiences are shaped by the social localities from which they emerge.
Published: May 15, 2023
This special issue of the Anthropology of Work Review calls for papers that take up the historically determinate conditions of work within gig economies and the processes of racialization constitutive of and produced through these conditions.
Published: May 13, 2023
Two postdoctoral positions in the ERC-funded project “FOODCIRCUITS: Hidden Connections Between Migrants and Societies”, based at Universitat de Barcelona and led by Professor Seth M. Holmes (PhD, MD). Deadline is May 23, 2023.
Original Exertions
Published: Apr 26, 2023
Reflections on the special issue of Anthropology of Work Review, "Immunocapital and Capitalist Immunities"
Published: Apr 04, 2023
A videoessay on AI labor, authored by Dayna McLeod, drawing upon labor from an AI writer and AI voice actor. Additional commentary by Lisa Messeri.
Published: Jan 18, 2023
Brie Berry (Ursinus College) reflects on the emotional burdens of reuse economies and the problem of waste.
Published: Feb 11, 2022
The recent media focus on whether Supreme Court justices mask in hearings shows all the ways in which Supreme Court justices are part of a workplace that shares many of the same dilemmas that other US workplaces facein the pandemic.
Published: Dec 15, 2021
A review essay examining two recent ethnographies by Erik Henningsen and Felix Stein.
Published: May 27, 2021
In the context of foreign-owned industrial farms in Brazil, the concept of the Plantationocene shows the racial dynamics of power and capital but obscures the fighting back of people, plants, and soils.
Thematic Collections
Teaching Tools
SI
JF
ZS
Published: May 28, 2022
A reflection on teaching time and labor in the classroom, building Marx's insights on class struggles over the working day.
Book Reviews
SW
DI
Published: Sep 05, 2023
Book review of Johan Soderberg and Maxigas's Resistance to the Current: The Dialectics of Hacking (2022)
SW
AC
Published: Aug 22, 2023
Book review of Edward F. Fischer's Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Tastemakers Create Value (2022)
SW
AS
Published: Aug 15, 2023
Book review of Lauren Carruth’s Love and Liberation: Humanitarian Work in Ethiopia’s Somali Region (2021)
SW
CM
Published: Jun 27, 2023
Book review of Gitte Marianne Hansen and Fabio Gygi's edited volume The Work of Gender: Service, Performance, and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan (2022)
