Conference Agenda

This paper offers insights into the socio-spatial dynamics of local labour market restructuring and the organization of migrant labour in post-industrial Western metropolises whose economies have been drastically reconfigured around the needs of flexible capitalism. It focuses on the proliferation of spaces for the exceptional management of undesirable populations and the re-territorialisation of contemporary apparatuses of control that increasingly penetrate ‘ordinary’ urban tissues and structures. These urban zones of exception represent concentrations of bordering practices at the intersection of welfare, bureaucracy, law-and-order policing and various infrastructures of arrival and involve a plethora of spatio-temporal-material technologies of governance, including legal exclusion, waiting, policing, containment and displacement. I take Duisburg-Marxloh, a former industrial stronghold and a current space riven with inequalities and racialized rampage as a privileged vantage point for exploring the productive potentialities of such technologies, especially in relation to the ways in which strategic loci of migration control such as the Job Center, law enforcement and informal support infrastructures contribute to the disciplining and supply of docile and disposable labour. The the organization of industrial cleaning, where conflicts between labour and capital have recently come to bear upon the district, serves to demonstrate the ways in which the rationality of spatial segregation and racialized containment have given rise to a profuse subcontracting model that is largely built on informality, hyper- flexibility and racialized segementation of the local workforce. The analysis draws on over a year of ethnographic observation into the work-life situations of East European migrant workers in Marxloh and the surrounding districts, as well as a series of activist interventions following the death of an industrial cleaner in local steel production facilities. In conclusion, I argue that exploring the spatial and socio-legal dimensions of migrant precarity and the specific modalities of urban ordering that underpin it can better visibilize the intersection between technologies of population governance and the transformation of local labour regimes.

This paper engages with theoretical discussions on social reproduction under neoliberal regimes of mobility, work, and welfare by revisiting the findings of a qualitative study (Simola, 2021) that investigated university-educated EU citizens’ experiences of free mobility in conditions of precarious labour. The participants were young adults who moved from four EU countries to enter the intensively competitive labour market of Brussels. While all the participants moved in search of work corresponding to their education and their ‘passion’, they subsequently experienced unemployment and worked under precarious arrangements of different kinds, including various forms of non-waged work. Additionally, their precarious labour position exposed them to national policies that hindered their access to social security entitlements in Belgium. Like several other EU countries, Belgium has raised barriers to EU migrants’ access to both welfare rights and residence rights. The study shows how specific conditionality imposed on EU migrants’ rights functioned in interplay with general welfare conditionality, constituting effective barriers in their access to social protection. The paper zooms into the consequent problematic situations in which many participants spent protracted periods of time working without adequate wages, while also unable to access social protection to secure subsistence. How did they sustain their lives under such adverse conditions and why did they continue their endeavours in Brussels despite of them? The paper focuses on three interlinked struggles of social reproduction in the participants’ lives: 1) the temporal struggles related to the substantial time they invested in non-waged work; 2) their material struggles of subsistence, dependency, and debt; and 3) their embodied struggles related to the reproduction of their capacity to work and sustain their lives in both physical and psychological senses.

Pineapples have long become one of the most important export products of Costa Rica. They, and other horticultural products, have been celebrated for creating jobs for the otherwise economically excluded rural population, especially in the country's northern regions. These agro-extractivist enclaves rely heavily on migrant workers, especially from the neighbouring Nicaragua. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the terrible living and working conditions of plantation workers became publicaly known, and discrimination and racism against (Nicaraguan) migrants increased. By focusing on the Costa Rican pineapple industry, this paper highlights the need to understand the impact of labour regimes beyond the workplace. Thus, my research intends to understand how the plantation labour regime and the racialized differences it produces and maintains influence social dynamics in rural Costa Rica. I start by empirically identifying the different forms of employment in the Costa Rican fresh fruit industry while mapping labour division across social groups. I argue that the plantation labour regime observed relies on a racialized production of difference. However, I do not merely aim to describe a particular labour regime and its role in capital accumulation. Instead, this step builds the foundation to analyze further the processes that produce, maintain, and transform specific forms of labour, most prominently migrant and non-migrant, and their separation. I will focus specifically on the process of racialization within the plantation labour regime and how this regime and the racialized differences it produces and relies on shape social relations and exacerbate racism and discrimination against Nicaraguan migrants in rural Costa Rica.

In various research disciplines, the role of science as the exclusive producer of knowledge and expertise is beginning to falter. Especially the examination of persons in precarious working and living conditions raises the question of the relationship of science to its "objects of research". Since the 1970s, there have been repeated attempts at research that seek to shift the classic subject-object relationship of the social sciences. Action research (Fine 2018) sets itself as an agent of social change; participatory research approaches realize different degrees of participation of studied groups of people in the research process (von Unger 2014; Kamali-Chirani et al. 2020) while community based research agendas rely on a close connection between science and civil society actors (Vaughn and Vazques 2017). These approaches vary between functionalist considerations, such as access to hard-to-reach groups of people or overcoming language barriers, and objectives such as improving the material living situation - at least of the researchers involved. This paper explores the role of community-based research approaches in studying and intervening in localized mobility regimes and asks what kind of scientific findings and other results can be used in this process. To this end, the article deals with different approaches of community-based and participatory research, shows their epistemological location, their relationship to science, as well as concrete methodological approaches. It gives insight into a study of experiences of discrimination in labour, housing and social rights in two urban areas in the city of Duisburg which are associated with labels such as ‘poverty migration’ and ‘migration from Southeast Europe’. The project is conducted in collaboration with two grassroot support organizations which employ community researchers who contribute actively throughout the research process, e.g., in shaping the research design, in data collection and the utilization of the results. The paper points out the limitations of such research approaches. They lie not only in the persistence of existing power relations, but also in the financial, personnel and administrative limits of the scientific system.