AWR - Call for Papers: Racialization and Gig Economies - Extension

Call for Papers: Racialization and Gig Economies

Christien Tompkins and Shreya Subramani invite submissions to a special issue of the Anthropology of Work Review

Proposed Publication Date: May/June 2025

Due Date for Manuscripts: Friday, November 15, 2024

This special issue of the Anthropology of Work Review calls for papers that take up the historically determinate conditions and transformations of gig economy work and the processes of racialization constitutive of and produced through these conditions. 

Amidst global transformations in the structure of labor and accumulation regimes over the last century, the United States has experienced transformations of work, from

Fordist labor structures toward ongoing evolutions of neoliberal labor markets that

valorize idea and niche economies. Each moment of these transformations articulates with significant shifts in state capacities and in the social geographies and ideologies of family, housing and quotidian life. In the U.S., neoliberal reconfigurations of public resources and institutions have devolved and dispersed responsibilities onto atomized subjects (Harvey 2005; Brown 2015; Freeman 2014). And uneven global patterns of privatization and financialization have rendered differentiated yet interconnected political economies of gig work internationally.

Recognizable features of such changes include: the development and expansion of gig economies through diaspora, novel managerial ideologies of “doing what you love” (Weeks 2017), and broader moves to deskill and cut contractual benefits (Graeber 2019). These phenomena all exist in relation to the valorization of new technologies of intelligence, mechanization, digitization, and mobility (Shibata 2021; Anwar, M. A., & Graham, 2021).

Large-scale and violent displacements in local and global contexts produce differentiating vulnerabilities for workers (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013). Migrants traverse borders and oceans to support kin and survive. These displacements are subtended by punitive stakes of imprisonment, military/paramilitary mobilization, and forms of organized abandonment in neighborhoods and nations (Gilmore 1999, 2007, 2008; Camp 2016; Besteman 2019). Alongside these volatile diasporic movements for workers, are the growing humanitarian and development economies of care work (Agier 2010; Andersson 2014). While these conditions mark our contemporary historical conjuncture (Gramsci 2011 (1971); Hall & Massey 2012), such global dynamics have always produced racializing assemblages (Weheliye 2014) constitutive of global political economies (Robinson 2000 (1983); Gordon 2005; Appel 2019).

These changing political economies continue to create modes of flexibilized and precarious dislocations of work and are important ethnographic terrains for emergent political critiques of (1) labor (waged and unwaged); (2) ideology (from bourgeois reproduction to anti-work resistance); and (3) material conditions (destruction of land, harm to ecological/bodily health, and the distribution of shelter and resources).

This special issue explores the emergence of “gig economies” as historical formations within racial capitalism:

●       How do we understand the racialized historical contexts and racializing processes that produce “gig economies”?

●       How do gig economies transform and situate the practices and ideologies of skill, technology, capacity, care and expertise within these racialized/racializing histories?

The editors of this special issue welcome submissions from diverse historical and geographic contexts and methodological and theoretical traditions of critique in conversation with anthropological and ethnographic conversations on labor and work. Moving beyond research which merely engages with or includes racialized populations or simply documents workers’ racial discrimination, submissions should offer historically situated critiques of transforming political economies in order to theorize how the racialized/racializing phenomena of gig economies articulate within the following sites:

technological development (Benjamin 2020, Irani 2019, Jobson 2021, Noble 2018); labor struggles (DuBois 1935, Kelley 2015, Winant 2021); carceral capacities and logics (Burton 2021, Sojoyner 2016); pedagogical methods (Apple 1988, Shange 2019, Sims 2017, Tompkins 2015); labor precarity, surveillance, and (in)security (Browne 2015, Monahan 2022)

Submissions may also present ethnographic explorations of racializing/racialized (re)valorizations of skill, capacity, expertise, and intelligence in work (Amrute 2016, Iskander 2022, Suchman 2007) that:

foreclose or potentiate collective solidarities (Blanchette 2019, Kassem 2023, Sargent 2020); reinforce or undermine work as a primary site of domination/authority and mode social/political organization (Anderson 2017, Hall 1980, Weeks 2011); or reify or unsettle normative subjectivities (Freeman 2014, Graeber 2019, Subramani 2022, Urciuoli 2008).

We welcome complete manuscripts of no more than 8000 words for consideration of inclusion by Friday, November 15, 2024 (email with contact information to [email protected]). Following a short review period we will invite a number of authors to submit to the journal for inclusion in the special issue.

●       Full submissions can be original research articles, long-form interviews, multimodal, auto-ethnographic, or theoretical in content but should be no more than 8,000 words.

●       Contributors are also invited to pitch ideas for supplementary materials to be published in the Society for the Anthropology of Work’s short-form, open access web publication, Exertions. These materials might include media objects or other materials that would help instructors and students to engage with the article more deeply or provide reflections on the relationship between teaching, learning and laboring as an academic. An optional one-page précis may be included as a supplementary document with the full submission.

Questions and inquiries can be directed to the special issue’s coeditors.

Christien Tompkins, [email protected]

Shreya Subramani, [email protected]

References

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Amrute, Sareeta Bipin. 2016. Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822374275.

Anderson, Elizabeth, and Stephen Macedo 2017. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Andersson, Ruben. 2014.   Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. First edition. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Anwar, Mohammad Amir, and Mark Graham. 2021.   Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Freedom, Flexibility, Precarity and Vulnerability in the Gig Economy in Africa. Competition & Change 25(2). SAGE Publications Ltd: 237–258.

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