BOOK LAUNCH: Beyond the Wage

Individual in the Labour Market and Gender and Working Lives reading groups

ILM Book Launch:
Beyond the Wage - featuring Asiya Islam, Liz Fouksman, Sam Strong, and Will Monteith (ed.)

Individual in the Labour Market and Gender &amp; Working Lives reading groups (Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge) host:<h3>Beyond the Wage: Ordinary Work in Diverse Economies </h3>(2021, Bristol University Press)We welcome:<ul><li>An introduction from editor Will Monteith </li><li>Asiya Islam presenting &#x27;Wilful Resignations: Women, Labour and Life in Urban India&#x27;</li><li>Liz Fouksman presenting &#x27;Defending the Wage: Visions of Work and Distribution in Namibia&#x27;</li><li>Sam Strong presenting &#x27;The Work of Looking for Work: Surviving Without a Wage in Austerity Britain&#x27;</li><li>And Anna Barford as our discussant</li></ul>Please join us for this exciting event.The event will be hosted on Zoom and a link will be available upon registration.For further information or the reading groups please contact William Fleming (wjf30@cam.ac.uk)---------------------------------------------------------------------<h3>Bios and abstracts</h3>Chapter AuthorsAsiya Islam:Dr Asiya Islam is the Joyce Lambert Research Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She is a sociologist and ethnographer interested in gender, class, and labour. Her research explores the lives of young women in urban India in the context of contemporary socio-economic change. For her PhD, which she completed in 2019 at the University of Cambridge, she studied the experiences of young lower middle class women working across cafes, call centres, malls, and offices in the service economy of New Delhi. Why do young women in Delhi wilfully leave service employment even though their incomes are important for the sustenance of their families? This chapter, based on long-term ethnographic research with lower middle class women in Delhi, shows that service employment is just one of many strategies that women invest in to secure lives. In particular, women tend to leave low-paid and insecure service employment in instances of threat to their respectability. Simultaneously engaged in employment, education, skills training, as well as domestic, care, and status-production work, young women switch from one activity to another in search for stability and security. Together these activities ensure the reproduction of life, highlighting the need to understand employment/unemployment through the framework of ‘ordinary work’, accounting for non-income generating activities at sites beyond workplaces.Liz Fouksman Liz Fouksman is a Lecturer at the Centre for Public Policy Research at King’s College London, and a Research Associate at the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Liz’s research interests revolve around perceptions of work, deservingness and the redistribution of wealth, particularly in southern Africa, as well as the politics and theory of post-work and universal basic income. Recent publications include ‘The Moral Economy of Work’ in Economy and Society (2020), and, with Hannah Dawson, ‘Labour, Laziness and Distribution’ in Africa (2020). Can those who cannot access wage labour imagine alternatives to it? This chapter of Beyond the Wage uses in-depth interviews with the long-term unemployed in rural Namibia to explore grassroots perceptions of work and redistributive policy proposals such as cash transfers and universal basic income (UBI). I show that even at the site of the 2008-9 basic income pilot in Namibia, the long-term unemployed continue to see wage work or entrepreneurship as a ‘proper’ source of income, as well as the basis for social, psychological and physical wellbeing. I argue that in thinking beyond the wage, both theorists and policy makers must consider not only income security but also alternative sources of meaning, absorption and social embeddedness in order to forge a new social, political and economic imaginary that lies beyond the confines of wage labour.Sam StrongSam Strong is a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge. His research lies at the intersection of urban, cultural, economic and political geography, with a specific interest in contemporary poverty and inequality. Sam has undertaken ethnographic work in both the UK’s richest and poorest communities, examining how people contest intimate and everyday inequalities. This work has been published in a range of popular and academic forums, including the journals Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Political Geography and Geoforum.My chapter examines the vernacular meanings and practices of work that pattern everyday life in the Valleys of south Wales—the UK’s most deprived region. Beginning with a critique of the popular conflation of work with waged labour under consecutive Conservative governments, I will argue that life ‘beyond the wage’ in the UK today is marked by constant, often desperate forms of work. Highlighted by the plight of Jeff, a long-term unemployed resident, I illustrate how these forms of work operate through different registers than traditionally conceived: they are enacted at a community rather than individual scale, they blur boundaries between emotional and affective labour, and are a vital feature of the contested geographies of survival for many in the Valleys today.Introduction - Will Monteith (Editor)William Monteith is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London. He obtained his PhD at the School of International Development at UEA in 2016 based on an ethnographic study of socioeconomic life in a central marketplace in Kampala, Uganda. Will is interested in the question of what it means to work in contexts in which people’s labour is not valued by the state or capitalist economy. His research explores subjective experiences of work, hustle and ‘make do’ at the margins of capitalist economies; the relationships, politics and places produced by these experiences, and the possibilities they provide for realising more just and inclusive economic geographies.Discussant - Anna Barford (Discussant)Dr Anna Barford is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. She has a particular interest in decent work and sustainable livelihoods in middle- and low-income countries. Anna’s research investigates the need for a socially restorative circular economy; the uptake and roll out of new corporate living wage commitments; the impacts of COVID-19 and climate change on young people’s livelihoods in Nepal, Indonesia and Uganda; and youth employment policy in the times of COVID-19.

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BOOK LAUNCH: Beyond the Wage

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