Exertions

This photo essay both documents new forms of worker publicity and seeks to respond to the representational gaps that these forms have revealed.

We have always allocated protections and obligations based on the degree to which a particular job is considered essential. What has changed with COVID-19 is the referent: essential to whom?

The radical roots of alternative institutions need to be recovered if we are to emerge from this crisis with a more just and vibrant food system.

While the virus has drastically diverging effects rooted in institutional racism, this fact is a "reveal" only for those who have, until now, had the privilege not to pay attention.

How does refugee labor figure as both neoliberal resilience building and a hopeful attempt to find a viable livelihood?

This essay responds to the exceptionalization of labor conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing these exploitative conditions to have long preceded the present crisis.

Support and care became confused on the frontline, and this confusion has consequences for what essential labor entails.

When a campus real estate boom promises profits, tradespeople and their families are left with few good choices.

Despite the vital role that Brazil's domestic workers play in maintaining their employers' homes and lifestyles, the workers’ own survival proves to be of little concern.

In exchange for abiding by rules designed to serve the public interest, taxi drivers in coastal Mexico qualified as essential laborers during the COVID-19 pandemic. So why are they sitting idle?

For nightworkers, the designation of frontline daytime laborers as essential has implicitly cast those who work backstage and through the night as expendable.

A survey of teleworkers in Catalonia during the early months of the pandemic sheds light on how they coped with the blurring of boundaries between work and life.

As we speak of COVID-19 as the prime culprit of deaths on the job, we tend to forget that workers—essential and not—have been sick and dying all along.

As online forms of intimacy like camming present alternatives to in-person encounters, sex workers navigate a patchwork of policies that point to double standards about the services they provide.

Taboos and neuroses rooted in capitalist social relations afflict Trinidad and Tobago, where elites strive to keep their distance from the care and street workers on whom they rely.

If the construct of heroism entails taking on personal risk voluntarily, then what does it mean to apply it to essential workers of color who have little choice about continuing to show up?

Examining tensions of humanization and critique, the centrality of violence, and policing as a global form, this Exertions collection makes the case for reading policing as work.

The wildcat strike at the University of California, Santa Cruz shows how logics of policing can be repurposed on campus to enforce current distributions of labor.

While well-intentioned, antiracist reforms fail to recognize and engage with the ontological structures of antiblackness that underpin policing.

Police discretion mediates between the material facts of life and death and the normative ideals of politics, holding out the possibility of a shared world.

Unpacking an incident on the streets of an Indian city shows how gender dynamics can complicate templates for understanding police violence.

Brazil's Antifascist Police Officers Movement challenges Northern logics of police abolition by taking worker identity as a lever for social transformation.

Racially Black and professionally blue, African American police officers are caught in the middle as both agents and targets of state violence.

Even as drug courts in the United States aim to chart an alternative to the War on Drugs, the tactics of coercion and surveillance on which they rely fall short of systemic change.

When pleasurable aspects of police work are stripped away, research with Danish detectives shows that they are deprived of the opportunity to relate to suspects in more than criminal terms.

A debate in France over two models of policing proved to turn on what activities could count as work under an ascendant "culture of results."

Right-wing politics in Norway is driving a neoliberal transformation of a policing system that once prided itself on restraint, accountability, and professional discretion.

Digital police work and what constitutes the digital rights of citizens have become sites of debate around human rights and policing in contemporary Turkey.

While unionization is enabled by joint experiences and shared anger, it can also be constrained by ideological and racialized difference.

The "dirty work" of policing racialized others stands to demystify the idea that the police are around to protect public order and security.

Neither police nor clinicians, hospital security represent the potential of enforcement even as they risk their own bodies in the service of medical practice.

Private university police departments aim to provide a sense of security that is profitable to the institution, even at the expense of public safety more broadly conceived.

Foregrounding the legal and procedural context of police employment can uncover pragmatic, time-tested strategies for reasserting community control.

Private security in South Africa marks a potential endpoint for policing under capitalism, where those at the bottom risk their lives to protect and quicken capital's predation.

Scenes from a hub providing support for hospital workers in London show how volunteer labor, grounded in an ethics of encounter, can sustain frontline work.

A review of the 2019 book by Maura Finkelstein, published by Duke University Press.

The patches that Mexico City repair workers use to shore up the city's water grid keep things functioning even as they sustain urban inequality.

A review of the 2019 book by Minh T. N. Nguyen, published by Oxford University Press.

A review of the 2019 book by Massimiliano Mollona, published by Berghahn Books.

A review of the 2019 book by Alexandrea Ravenelle, published by the University of California Press.

A review of the 2019 book by Hannah Appel, published by Duke University Press.

A review of the 2019 book by Andrew Flachs, published by University of Arizona Press.

A review of the 2020 book by Erin Hatton, published by University of California Press.

A review of the 2020 book by Juliet Schor, published by University of California Press.

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.

Graduate students from the Society for the Anthropology of Work respond to Ieva Jusionyte's award-winning book Threshold.

Graduate students from the Society for the Anthropology of Work respond to Ieva Jusionyte's award-winning book Threshold.

Graduate students from the Society for the Anthropology of Work respond to Ieva Jusionyte's award-winning book Threshold.

Graduate students from the Society for the Anthropology of Work respond to Ieva Jusionyte's award-winning book Threshold.

Graduate students from the Society for the Anthropology of Work respond to Ieva Jusionyte's award-winning book Threshold.

Ieva Jusionyte, whose book Threshold was the winner of the 2020 SAW Book Prize, responds to the graduate student contributors to this book forum.

A review of the 2019 book by Maggie Dickinson, published by the University of California Press.

Early-career researchers from the Society for the Anthropology of Work respond to Mythri Jegathesan's award-winning book Tea and Solidarity.

Early-career researchers from the Society for the Anthropology of Work respond to Mythri Jegathesan's award-winning book Tea and Solidarity.

Early-career researchers from the Society for the Anthropology of Work respond to Mythri Jegathesan's award-winning book Tea and Solidarity.

Early-career researchers from the Society for the Anthropology of Work respond to Mythri Jegathesan's award-winning book Tea and Solidarity.

Mythri Jegathesan, whose book Tea and Solidarity was the winner of the 2020 Diana Forsythe Prize, responds to the early-career contributors to this book forum.

Early-career researchers from the Society for the Anthropology of Work respond to Mythri Jegathesan's award-winning book Tea and Solidarity.

A review of the 2019 book by Megan A. Styles, published by the University of Washington Press.

A review of the 2021 book edited by Deepa Das Acevedo and published by Cambridge University Press.

The limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have not hampered migrant women labor activism in Argentina, but instead have galvanized political action.

A review of the 2019 book by Courtney Lewis, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

A review of the 2019 book by Amit S. Rai, published by Duke University Press.

Las limitaciones impuestas por la pandemia del COVID-19 no han impedido el activismo por los derechos laborales de las mujeres migrantes en Argentina, sino que han impulsado la acción política.

A review of the 2018 book by Stephen Campbell, published by Cornell University Press.

A review essay examining two recent ethnographies by Erik Henningsen and Felix Stein.

A review of the 2020 book by Daniel Tubb, published by the University of Washington Press.

A review of the 2019 book by Pem Davidson Buck, published by Monthly Review Press.

A review of the 2019 book by Lincoln Addison, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

The media focus on whether Supreme Court justices mask shows the ways in which their workplace shares many of the same pandemic dilemmas that other U.S. workplaces do.