Course Description:

This course examines the intersection of disposability, migration, and contestation in the making and unmaking of working classes. The goal is to overcome the structural and poststructural divide by exploring the possibilities for an anthropology of labor. How are current social processes and contingencies producing new labor relations? What is the role of late capitalism in these transformations? How do anthropologists theorize labor in relation to dispossession, and disposability under neoliberal and postneoliberal regimes? Is the study of labor and labor migration still relevant? What are the strategies that working classes use to contest labor regimes? What are the mechanisms and strategies (discourses, policies, different legal statuses, papers–documentation–, identifications, facial recognition, walls, fences, etc.) employed by states to regulate labor and its mobility? How do scholars understand migration as part of the political economy? Drawing from theoretical and ethnographic works in history, sociology, and anthropology, this course will have a global perspective, but it will also include cases from the United States.

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