From the Reciprocity Study Group, we invite you to the seminar series Racial Capitalism, Borders and Migrations.
First session.
GER-OACU Seminar: Racial Capitalism, Borders and Migration
April 02 (second) at 12h noon in the Anthropology Seminar, Faculty of Geography and History.
The social reproduction of living labour in a racially capitalist and bordered world
Olivia Maury, Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki
The everyday lives of non-EU citizens who must renew their residence permits regularly are often shaped by the concern of economically and socially making a living. Constraints to life-making due to gigified and fragmented payment structures, restrictive border regimes and racialising social structures, contribute to the reproduction of racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya 2023) as an economic system in which profit is extracted from racialised bodies driven to depletion, that is, from the barely ‘living’ labour of the working subjects.
In the paper, I strive to deepen the understanding of the efforts to ‘have a life’ (Narotzky 2022; Maury 2024) by analysing the complex relations of force stemming from political, social and administrative- legal procedures which in their intersections reproduce contemporary racial capitalism, albeit with local specificities. The analysis draws on ethnographic data produced with temporarily residing migrant gig workers in Finland. I analyse social reproduction as part of “the hidden infrastructure that produces workforces for the purposes of capital” (Taylor and Rioux 2018) in specifically two ways. First, it encompasses a perspective on the border regime as shaping migrants’ presence and space for manoeuvre in the country. Thus, I centre migrants’ ongoing concern of reproducing a ‘legally legible self’ and the associated right to work as a form of social reproduction. Second, I analyse the racialised space and time for reproduction in a work context characterised by fragmentariness and in which workers reproductive functions are handled in between gigs, thereby pointing to the situated power-difference topographies that are shaped in relation to asymmetrical wealth transfers (Gilmore 2022).
The paper contributes with situated understandings of social reproduction beyond the domestic space and normative gender relations, instead unfolding as a terrain of struggle including transformative perceptions of life-making in a racially capitalist and bordered world.
Olivia Maury is a university lecturer in sociology at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. Her research stretches across the fields of critical migration studies, the sociology of work and theories of capitalist extraction, focusing currently on how the platformisation of work generates new tensions between workers’ subjective desires and capital accumulation. Olivia’s research has been published in journals such as Work, Employment and Society, Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Migration Studies.
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