Thinking throughabout work

1
Thinking through/about work

• 14 May 2007
• Seminar four
• Linda McDowell
• School of Geography, University of Oxford

2
Focus and pre-amble

• Questions not answers
• Divisions of labour
• Political economy to performativity or both
• Theorising complex inequalities
  intersectionality
• Butler, Ong, post-colonial theory,
  intersectionality
• Methods as well as theory

3
Structure of talk

• Transnational migration and divisions of labour
• Theorising complexity McCall
• More than an embedded analysis
• Appropriate bodies?
• Gendered and racialised identities
• Forms of complexity
• Conclusions

4
Complexity

• Fluid, contingent and multiple identities
• Intersectionality
• And yet, race, class and gender matter
• Status of categories
• Performative or structural differences?
• Anti, intra and inter-categorical complexity

5
Questions about intersectioanlity

• Are identities situated accomplishments?
• How do we then re-engage with questions of
  structural inequalities and power?
• Does recognition of complexity mean abandonment
  of categories?Are identities constructed solely
  through discourse and practice?
• Should we focus on previously neglected
  intersections (and what might they be??

6
Nothing new/new questions

• Divisions of labour/segmentation
• Globalisation and transnational migration
• How are material transformations and new
  theorisations connected?
• Theoretical promiscuity
• How do we decide what matters?
• Multiple frameworks
• Key ? how are particular (migrant) embodied
  workers constructed as appropriate for low status
  jobs in the global economy

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Managed migration policies

• Differentiation of labour by country skills
  social characteristics
• Rights in receiving country
• Construction of identities there and here
• And so, a range of questions to answer.

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Questions include

• How are connections and practices across spatial
  scales transformed when the subject being made is
  a migrant?
• Are the gendered identities of migrants subject
  to re-negotations on entering a different space?
• How do traces of the regulatory structure of
  being there affect being here?
• How do previous cultural assumptions about gender
  attributes and capacities, about appropriate
  tasks for particular gendered categories work out
  across space and time?

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Subjectification

• Ong Formal and cultural citizenship rights
• Butler heterosexual matrix grid of cultural
  intelligibility through which bodies, gender and
  desires are naturalised (1990, p 151) but how
  intelligible to migrants?
• Racialised identities white normativity?
• And so
  

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Cultural citizenship

• a cultural process of subjectification in the
  Foucauldian sense of self-making and being-made
  by power relations that produce consent through
  schemes of surveillance, discipline, control and
  administrations (Ong 1996, p 337).
• Thus becoming a citizen (or a worker LMcD)
  depends on how one is constituted as a subject
  who exercises power or submits to power
  relations (ibid, p738)

11
Labour market effects

• Racial and ethnic markers are highly gendered and
  impact on appropriateness for different jobs
• Skills, talents, bodies
• Schemas of racial difference, civilisation and
  economic worth position migrants as inferior
• human capital, self-discipline and consumer
  power are associated with whiteness Ong 1997 p
  739.
• Impact of A8 migration on hierarchies of
  desirability

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Conceptual and methodological questions

• Are case studies, even individual stories and
  narratives, the only way to understand complex
  intersections of discursively constructed
  identities of new workers/new citizens?
• Do theoretical perspectives that see identities
  as produced through historically and spatially
  specific practices logically imply the rejection
  of distinct categories?

13
Complex inequalities

• Significance of categories?
• Anti- and intra-categorical approaches argue
  against imposition of a stable and homogenising
  order on a more unstable and heterogeneous social
  reality (McCall 2005 p 177).
• Is an intra-categorical approach the way to go?
• Methodological questions which differences
  matter? How decide? Are comparisons useful? Are
  case studies sufficient?
• Does it make a difference where you start
  theoretically?

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Concluding questions

• Same old differences in new form?
• Is theoretical promiscuity the best way forward?
• What about political resistance/ basis of
  struggles?