All tagged labor

Pathologies of Labour: How Work Destroys Health in Urban India

Pathologies of Labour: How Work Destroys Health in Urban India

Tanuj Luthra
Articles

While conducting fieldwork with informal doctors in low-income neighbourhoods in Delhi, I noticed that several patients consulted them for what appeared to be work-related ailments. Reflecting on these encounters at the intersection of medicine and labour, I thought about how work consumes both our time and our vitality, and how responses to the effects of work mobilize particular ideas of care and wellbeing. I wondered: if health is socially constructed, in what ways does labour construct it? In this essay, I explore how, across various urban work contexts — from informal sector work to supposedly good jobs in “India Inc.” — people experience and differently articulate a range of symptoms and conditions (such as stress, tension, fatigue, pain, injury, and various infectious diseases) in relation to their labour.

A Drawing Out: Visibilizing the Labor of Care, Enacting Mutual Aid

A Drawing Out: Visibilizing the Labor of Care, Enacting Mutual Aid

Angela Beallor
Articles

The author explores the proposals and policies for radical caretaking labor reform drafted by Soviet theorist and policymaker Aleksandra Kollontai during the Soviet 1920s. She meditates on the potential of depiction and enaction in artistic production and collaborative performance. This is to help pre-figure mutual aid, collaboration, community organization, and caretaking in the current world as we struggle to upend the current capitalist and patriarchal status quo(s). She draws on her collaborative performance project, A Drawing Out :: Lactic Orchestration, first staged in 2018, as well as the ideas of those, such as Angela Garbes, who have made compelling intersectional calls for valuing the essential labor of care work within the context of the current global pandemic.