Dissertationen zum Thema „Anthropology, Cultural|Women's Studies|Economics, Labor“

Day laborers in the United States have increasingly become a source of labor in the informal economy due to the pressure for businesses to reduce labor costs (Gonzalez 2007; Ordóñez 2016; Valenzuela 2001). Day laborers provide necessary labor yet are exempt from typical workplace regulations, making them an ideal source for inexpensive labor (Theodore, Valenzuela Jr., and Meléndez 2009). Though day laborers are a vulnerable population, they are also united and show strength as a collective. This project is an ethnography of a grassroots organization of day laborers in Southern California that I call the Day Labor Center (DLC). I argue that migrant day laborers, despite vulnerabilities and structural inequalities, demonstrate agency and flexibility in the workplace and in their everyday lives.

Through 22 months of fieldwork, including observations, interviews, and group discussions, I present the experiences of migrant day laborers to reveal the unique contradictions they face as they navigate employment alongside broader structural boundaries that add to their precarious existence. While migrant day laborers are economically marginal, they simultaneously control their own labor in ways that other workers cannot when they set their own schedules, negotiate wages, and choose their employment conditions. Furthermore, because most day laborers are undocumented, they are a marginalized workforce, yet openly visible as available workers and active participants of the community. My fieldwork reveals that migrant workers at the DLC demonstrate “local citizenship” (Villazor 2010, 574) as they have become embedded into the local community and may serve as a potential model for how local community members and policymakers can offer more inclusive spaces for migrants. This research highlights the central role of day labor centers as sources of empowerment for migrant workers as they provide services, encourage collaboration and resource-sharing, and foster community. Finally, although many migrant day laborers are isolated and far from family, labor centers can foster a sense of community and empower them to create new forms of kinship and belonging. Ultimately, this research contributes to current anthropological scholarship regarding migration and labor and informs our understanding of the varied experiences and responses to vulnerabilities that migrant workers confront.

Over the past few decades US businesses have increasingly turned toward flexible employment relationships made up of temporary workers who do not receive the benefits and rights of standard full-time employment. Temporary labor agencies, which operate by leasing workers out to client businesses, form one component of this shift toward flexible labor and previous researchers have called for more study on this group of formalized employment. My research thesis explores the employment relationships between temporary labor agencies and temporary laborers in order to understand the ways in which this type of labor arrangement affects workers' lives. I performed my research in Flagstaff, Arizona and my study population is primarily comprised of temporary laborers. I conducted participant observation, questionnaires, interviews, time budgets, and archival research to perform my research. I interpret my data through a combination of political economy, performance theory, and anthropology of the body approaches. My findings reveal how people end up working temporary labor, the daily challenges they face, their strategies to increase their job security, and the effects temporary labor has on their lives and bodies.

Until 1976, women in Alabama could choose to make use of a midwife when they gave birth. In that year, the Alabama state legislature outlawed the practice. This dissertation explores the consequences of that decision as well as the efforts of contemporary non-nurse midwives, also known as Certified Professional Midwives (CPM’s), to re-establish the practice as an option available to birthing women in the state.

In order to address the consequences of outlawing non-nurse midwives in the state of Alabama a mixed methodology approach is applied. Two years of ethnographic data collection approached with a feminist and cultural anthropology lens, reveal that the lack of medical infrastructure within the state of Alabama prohibits the ability for CPM’s to practice safely. This is owed to historically grounded stigma in racism and classism. As a result, the current CPM community within the state of Alabama, along with their clientele, is predominantly white. This is reflected in the case studies within the dissertation as all the families and care providers, regardless of clinical expertise, are all white. An examination of cesarean rates via quantitative analysis supports the historical and ethnographic findings. Cesarean rates are highest within counties that have a low median household income, and a population that is predominately African American.

The dissertation features five case studies of women who gave birth attended by a CPM. By relating the experiences of the birthing mothers, a CPM, and certified medical professionals, the dissertation offers evidence of the kind of supplemental medical care and knowledge that can be offered by practitioners of midwifery. At the same time, while contemporary midwives such as the one featured here offer important medical service to their clients, they are not equipped to or knowledgeable about political work necessary to push for the re-legalization of midwifery. This dissertation thus sheds light on the challenges facing midwives who would prefer to work openly and legally in the state.

Ultimately what is revealed is the value of supplementary healthcare networks within the state. While care and birth services provided by CPM’s is not readily accessible to all, those giving birth in Alabama can find support within the current system through supplementary healthcare networks. These networks include doulas, lactation support groups, babywearing groups, etc. It is a piecemeal system to be sure, but it is a piecemeal system that is working diligently to unlearn biases, and support women and birthing families. However, it is important to understand that the supplemental networks cannot fully address the larger structural crisis that is a lack of infrastructure within the state’s medical system. Ideally, a system that utilizes Obstetricians, Nurse Midwives, and Non-nurse Midwives, all with mutual respect for their own expertise, would exist to provide quality care to women throughout the state.

This dissertation focuses on the experiences of children who work the streets of Lima primarily as jugglers, musicians, and candy vendors. I explore how children's everyday lives are marked not only by the hardships typically associated with poverty, but also by their need to respond to the dominant notions of childhood, family roles, and urban order that make them into symbols of underdevelopment. In particular, I argue that transnational discourses about the perniciousness of child labor, articulated through development agencies, NGOs, the Peruvian state, the media, and everyday interpersonal exchanges, perpetuate an idea of childhood that not only fails to correspond to the realities of the children that I came to know, but that reinscribes a view of them and their families as impediments to progress and thus available for diverse forms of moral intervention. I ground my analysis in a notion that I call "public childhoods." This concept draws attention to the ways that subjectivities form through intersecting mechanisms of power, in this sense capturing nuances that common terms such as "street children" and "child laborer" gloss over. Children, I show, are a symbolic site for the articulation of the kinds of classed, raced and gendered differences that characterize Lima's contemporary urban imaginary. As they bear the embodied effects of such discourses, I argue, children who work the streets also participate - if in subtle ways - in these everyday ideological struggles into which they are drawn.

My dissertation is based on twenty-two months of fieldwork in Peru, in addition to several one- and two-month periods of preliminary and follow-up research. As an ethnographer, my research consisted primarily of accompanying children as they went about their daily routines. Beyond "hanging out" in their workspaces, which included a busy traffic intersection in an upper-middle class district and public buses, I also spent a great deal of time with the children's families, typically in their homes in Lima's shantytowns and working-class neighborhoods. I also attended meetings and otherwise participated in institutional spaces such as NGOs, social movements, Congressional hearings, and advocacy groups. Finally, in order to gain a more long-term perspective on discussions and policies involving childhood, I conducted research in Lima's historical archives.

This dissertation examines the conjuncture of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and migrant social life in the urban space of Beijing as a problematic of what Foucault called biopower, where distinct logics of market and state power deploy techniques of civil society and culture in the form of public-private partnerships. The unique effect of this conjuncture is an expanding logic of power that obfuscates lines of antagonism between capital and labor, requiring new theoretical and methodological insight into how power, resistance, and antagonism might be conceived in the biopolitical era.

Drawing on recent work on biopower and new theories of antagonism and subjectivity, I argue (following Badiou's work) that both power and resistance must be articulated in their divided tendencies, which allows us to work through how certain tendencies may be contradictory and complementary, and to redraw the lines of antagonism at the level of subjectivity in terms of these divided tendencies. These lines of antagonism don't fall between public/private, market/state, or civil society/state, but along a process by which subjectivities are produced and sustained at a "distance" from the logic of their placement in society, or integrated into power by various strategies of civil society and culture. The practices and theoretical productions of one migrant cultural organization in Beijing, whose project centers on the production of new migrant subjectivity and culture in the transformation of self and society, provides insight into how we might conceive of politics as new forms of "distance" from the logic of biopower.

Through over twelve months of intensive fieldwork from 2010-2011 and follow up trips the following year on the intersection between Corporate Social Responsibility and migrant social life in Beijing, I trace the techniques by which antagonistic subjectivity is intervened upon. First, I examine the surrounding discourses, logics, and conditions of knowledge production on culture that inform the projects of migrant subjectivity from a historical perspective, and reveal a theoretical impasse in the displacement and disavowal of revolutionary culture to grapple with how to re-think antagonistic contradictions in the pervading market logic of difference. The continuation of this impasse into the biopolitical era is brought into focus through the state and market turn to "culture industries" that include, mirror, and delimit migrant social life in Beijing. Problematizing the rise of self-articulated migrant subjectivity and migrant culture amidst these public-private projects, I then turn to the practices of one migrant organization whose project draws upon a legacy of struggle for self-organized and self-run migrant collective practices to successfully confront and block a situation of forced demolition and displacement. Analyzing how elements from state, market, and "civil society" interacted through public-private partnerships in the situation of daily migrant struggles, I identify the importance of the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility in the urban space of Beijing and the growth of biopolitical practices of intervention upon the migrant issue. I argue that the effect of the diffusion of Corporate Social Responsibility as a social practice is to enroll migrants as active participants in a social life that makes their subjectivities and productive activities visible to the public sphere. Lines of antagonism can thus be drawn by taking up distinctions between subjectivities oriented toward "the public," "self-governance," and the CSR "community," versus collective self-organizing. I conclude by arguing that if biopower seeks to mirror practices of resistance and power by drawing upon the self-activities of cooperative subjects, then thinking about the self-organized and self-run migrant organization as a new form of "distance" may shed light on how antagonism and political struggle might be redefined today.

Young people in Japan contend with shifting understandings of family and friends, insecure jobs, and changing frames around global and national identities. The category of youth itself is unsettled amid a long period of social and economic change and perceived widely as crisis. Within contested social categories of youth, how do young Japanese people use the city, media, and body practices to create flexible, meaningful sociality across spaces of work, education, and play? What do youthful sociality and practices reveal about globally oriented connections and how do they inform conceptions of the future, kinship, gender, and pluralized identities? In short, what is the embodied and affective experience of being young as the category itself is increasingly unstable and full of risks? These questions shape the contours of this project.

This dissertation considers youth through its becoming, that is, the lived enactment of youth as energy, emotion, and sensibility always in motion and within range of cultural, spatial, bodily, and technological forces. Three groups of young people in this layered latitudinal study demonstrate various relations to the city street, visual media, globalized identities, contingent work within affect and cultural production, and education. The three groups are distinctly different but share surprising points of connection.

I lived alongside these three groups to understand the ways young people are innovating within the shifting form of youth. I skated with male skateboarders in their teens to early 30s who created Japan's most influential skate company; I taught kids attending a specialized cram school for kikokushijo (children who have lived abroad due to a parent's job assignment); I observed and hung out with young creative workers, the photographers, web designers, and graphic artists who produce the visual and textual content and relationships composing commercial "youth culture."

My project examines how these young people redefine youth through bodily practices, identities, and economic de/attachments. The skaters' embodied actions distribute/dissipate their energies in risky ways outside formal structures of labor. The kikokushijo children, with their bi-cultural fluency produced in circuits of capitalist labor, offer a desirable image of a flexible Japanese future while their heterogeneous identities appear threatening in the present. The creative workers are precariously positioned as "affective labor" within transglobal (youth) cultural production, working to generate visual and textual content constant stressful uncertainties. All three groups share uneasy ground with capitalist practices, risky social identities, and crucially, intimate relations with city space. In attending to their practices through ethnographic participation and video, this dissertation explores questions concerning youthful relations to space produced in material contacts, remembered geographies of other places and imaginary urban sites.

The dissertation itself is electronic and non-linear; a formal enactment of the drifting contact between forms of youth. It opens up to lines of connection between questions, sites, events, and bodies and attempts an unfolding of affect, imagination, and experience to tell stories about histories of gender and labor, city life, and global dreams. It asks if the globalized forms of Japanese youth avoid the risks of the impossible secure for the open possibilities of becoming and thus refuse containment by crisis?