Anthropology

The Anthropology of Work, Labour and Precarity

Module code: L6302A
Level 6
30 credits in autumn semester
Teaching method: Seminar, Lecture
Assessment modes: Essay, Coursework

This module recognises that most people spend a huge amount of their lives engaged in ‘work,’ but what counts as work—and how much it is valued—is culturally and historically specific.

Under global capitalism, labour markets are organised to exploit and profit from social difference, including (but not limited to) gender, race, nationality, migration status, and class. Anthropologists show how everyday experiences of work (re)produce economic subjectivities, social hierarchies, and social relations in complex ways.

Recently, a resurgence of collective activism around economic precarity, racial injustice, sexual harassment, and gender inequalities has made the workplace an important locus of struggle and political relevance.

Drawing extensively on ethnographies of work, labour precarity, wageless life, emotional labour, and the arts of living, this module seeks to understand the role of work in people’s individual and collective lives. Taking an ethnographic, feminist, anti-racist perspective helps us break down timeworn categories that have been used to theorise work in the past (formal/informal, public/private, paid/unpaid, and so forth) to think anthropologically about the relationship between ‘making a living’ and ‘making a life.’

This module will help you develop a fine-tuned appreciation of how labour mediates human relationships with the environment, with each other, and with utopian possibilities for the future.

Module learning outcomes

  • demonstrate knowledge and understanding of anthropological approaches to work, labour and/or precarity
  • demonstrate ability to critically assess key theoretical debates in the anthropology of work, labour and/or precarity in written form
  • relate anthropological theory to specific ethnographic contexts in the analysis of economic practices
  • evaluate the strengths and weakness of anthropological research on work and labour, and its contributions to understandings of contemporary economic life