Missing Links in Labour Geography

Bergene, Ann Cecilie; Endresen, Sylvi B.; Knutsen, Hege Merete

doi:10.4324/9781315595597

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…This article focuses on teachers' agency in the latter sense. The specific constraints on agency experienced by public sector workers have received attention from labor geographers (Coe, 2012;Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011;Jordhus-Lier, 2012), with some analysis focusing on the Global South (Bergene et al, 2010;Jordhus-Lier, 2013). Many of these, including the ability of their employer to draw direct recourse from the coercive powers of the state, as well as the particularly strategic question of communitylabor relationships, are addressed here.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Labor geographies of socially embedded work: The multi scalar resistance of Mexican teachers

Bocking

2018

Environ Plan A

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Public sector workers experience particular challenges from the state when they organize and take collective action. Accountable to administrators as well as parents, teachers are embedded within complex power relations at scales from the classroom to the district and the state or nation. This article draws on labor geography’s understandings of how worker agency is socially situated, to explore how the capacities for protest of dissident elementary and secondary teachers in Mexico City have been limited. These obstacles are found within their workplaces governed by the local Secretary of Public Education, in broader political dynamics within the city and in a centralization of governance over education policy to the national level. As a result, between 2013 and 2016 , teachers here were less likely to join protests against policies initiated by President Enrique Peña Nieto that were widely deemed harmful to their professional autonomy, and which drew strong resistance in other regions of the country. This article concludes by briefly assessing how, as Peña Nieto’s term concluded, dissident teachers turned towards the national election and an equivocal relationship with the center-left Morena party.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Labor geographies of socially embedded work: The multi scalar resistance of Mexican teachers

Bocking

2018

Environ Plan A

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“…Labour geography aims to exist in-and-beyond economic geography, attempting to counter a latent ‘capital-centricity’ through a focus on worker agency (see, Coe, 2013; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011; Hastings, 2016; Lier, 2007; Strauss, 2018, 2020a, 2020b). But despite functioning as an important corrective, autocritiques of labour geography have long highlighted the overwhelming focus on the official labour movement (Rutherford, 2010), white male workers (McDowell, 2015), and struggles in the global North (Bergene and Endresen, 2010), while often overlooking the role of migrants and migration in labour struggles (Buckley et al, 2017). Overcoming such lacunae, we argue that the fundamental motivations of the autonomist project – in particular the Copernican inversion, class composition analysis, and workers’ inquiry – reveal autonomist geography as a labour geography par excellence.…”

Section: Labour Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

From autonomous to autonomist geographies

Gray

Clare

2022

Progress in Human Geography

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Autonomist Marxist ideas and concepts are resurgent and, with their latent spatiality, are well placed to contribute to radical geographical debates. In particular, the methodology of ‘class composition’ analysis provides a rigorous, materialist critique of transforming capitalist social relations. This paper first provides vital historical–theoretical context from the milieu of Italian Operaismo, before emphasising the value of autonomist Marxist analyses of three contemporary geographical frontiers: labour process, migration, and social reproduction. It ultimately argues that the laudable motivations of the autonomous geographies project, explored in this very journal, would be better served through an explicitly materialist autonomist geography.

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“…Several calls have been made (Herod, 1995(Herod, , 1997Castree, 2007;Bergene et al, 2010) urging labour geographers to engage both empirically and theoretically with labour as an active agent in the production of economic geographies. As has been noted by Castree (2007) and Coe and Jordhus-Lier (2011), the concept of agency within labour geography tends to refer to various forms of collective agency, "labour struggles" and "campaigns" rather than individual agency.…”

Section: Agency In Labour Geography Labour (Im)mobilities and Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobile with an agency: Negotiating the spatiotemporalities of the temp migrant worker

et al. 2018

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Several calls have been made by labour geographers in support for a more thorough investigation and theorization of labour as an active agent in the production of economic geographies. As noted by Castree (2007) the concept of agency within labour geography remains undertheorized, an observation that has inspired scholars such as Coe and Jordhus-Lier (2011) and Hastings and MacKinnon (2017) to propose the re-embedding of agency in arenas stretching from global production networks (GPNs) to the workplace. The present paper continues this endeavor, albeit from a different angle, i.e. by examining how Swedish agency warehouse workers and temp nurses working in Norway act and think in relation to mobility and how certain spatiotemporalities come into play in the mobility agency of individual workers. To expand our understanding of agency we combine several strands of literature. In particular, we consider the criticism raised by scholars such as Cresswell (2006), Adey (2010) and Hanson (2010) on the tendency to celebrate mobility (over immobility) because of the association with ideas of progress, freedom, power and change. In connection to this, we claim that the coupling between mobility and power/agency is manifest also in conceptualizations of workers 'mobility power' (Smith, 2006) and in current theorization regarding migrant and immigrant workers' ability to strategize around their mobility (

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Missing Links in Labour Geography

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Labor geographies of socially embedded work: The multi scalar resistance of Mexican teachers

Labor geographies of socially embedded work: The multi scalar resistance of Mexican teachers

From autonomous to autonomist geographies

Mobile with an agency: Negotiating the spatiotemporalities of the temp migrant worker

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