Escaping a migrant metropolis: Post-Soviet urbanization through the art project Nasreddin in Russia

This article narrates the politics of escape from borders and labour discipline in a post-Soviet migrant metropolis drawing on the art-activism project Nasreddin in Russia. It explores the relation between control and autonomy in urban migrations through a trans-aesthetics: a set of visual and verbal stories weaving together experiences and outcomes of the art project with academic debates on late capitalist urbanization. The encounter of artistic practices and migrants’ embodied, everyday struggles to inhabit the city, it is suggested, has potential for disrupting the disciplinary and exclusionary effects of capitalist transformations and migration enforcement. This is made visible through transient spaces of escape in which the everyday lives and social worlds of migrants, constrained by the precarization of labour and by the multiplication and diversification of bordering practices, are reclaimed through laughter, mobility and care. This point is illustrated by focusing on three such spaces and practices: trickster politics in the housing market, acts of disidentification and care work on the city ‘as a body.’ The article offers a methodologically innovative contribution to ongoing debates on aesthetic political economy, cities and borders and artistic and activist interventions in global cities.Peer reviewe

"Pagod, Dugot, Pawis (Exhaustion, Blood, and Sweat)": Transnational Practices of Care and Emotional Labour among Filipino Kin Networks

While the global care chains literature presupposes that care work flows unidirectionally along a hierarchical chain from the Global South to the Global North (Hochschild 2000; Parreas 1998, 2000), this dissertation argues for a reconceptualization of transnational care and emotional labour that goes beyond links in a chain. Drawing on multisited ethnographic research conducted with a total of seventy participants in the Philippines, Canada, and Hong Kong, this study offers a more expansive approach to understanding transnational care and emotional labour as multiphased, multidirectional, multirelational, and multilocational in scope. This dissertation makes some key interventions in gender, migration, and care scholarship. First, it understands that transnational care occurs in multiple phases in order to account for reconfigurations of care across the life course, such as migrants performing end-of-life care for elderly kin. Second, in contrast to the global care chains literature, which frames care as unidirectional, it highlights the ways in which care flows in multiple directions, showing how those who receive care also give care. Third, it moves away from an exclusive focus on the mother-child dyad, thereby decentering the Western heteronormative nuclear family structure and demonstrating how transnational care is multirelational, involving several generations and broader communities of carers. Fourth, it underscores the ways in which transnational care is multilocational by acknowledging how migrant networks often shift locales and perform care labour from multiple sites at once. Finally and most importantly, this dissertation foregrounds Pinay peminist kuwentuhan, or Filipina feminist talkstory - a dynamic, collective, inclusive, participatory storytelling and storybuilding process that activates Pinay ways of knowing and being in the world. Pinay peminist kuwentuhan guides readers on a journey towards understanding the ways in which transnational Filipinos maintain kin solidarity and support the collective survival of migrant carers over time. Tracing the transnational caring practices of four Filipino migrant networks specifically, their innovative use of traveling artefacts and information and communication technologies (ICTs) this dissertation provides a more culturally nuanced approach to understanding transnational practices of care and emotional labour

ICTs AND EMPLOYMENT: NEW OPPORTUNITIES ON THE LABOUR MARKET

Objectives: In this paper, the potential for increasing employment opportunities and skills availability is investigated. Prior work: E-work activities differ by countries, with impact in various fields. Approach: The statistical data are used to underline the trends. Results: E-work is an emerging process and supports the development of a new business model. Implications and value: From the businesses perspective, e-work phenomenon may represent a new opportunity, and competitiveness could be improved. Also, e-work may present advantages and disadvantages with influences on the results of workers and businesses. In this paper such trends are analysed, in a comparative approach

Experiencing space–time: the stretched lifeworlds of migrant workers in India

In the relatively rare instances when the spatialities of temporary migrant work, workers’ journeys, and labour-market negotiations have been the subject of scholarly attention, there has been little work that integrates time into the analysis. Building on a case study of low-paid and insecure migrant manual workers in the context of rapid economic growth in India, we examine both material and subjective dimensions of these workers’ spatiotemporal experiences. What does it mean to live life stretched out, multiplyattached to places across national space? What kinds of place attachments emerge for people temporarily sojourning in, rather than moving to, new places to reside and work? Our analysis of the spatiotemporalities of migrant workers’ experiences in India suggests that, over time, this group of workers use their own agency to seek to avoid the experience of humiliation and indignity in employment relations. Like David Harvey, we argue that money needs to be integrated into such analysis, along with space and time. The paper sheds light on processes of exclusion, inequality and diff erentiation, unequal power geometries, and social topographies that contrast with neoliberalist narratives of ‘Indian shining

The Increasing Use of Portable Computing and Communication Devices and its Impact on the Health of EU Workers

[Excerpt] Portable computing and communication devices are widely used by workers from different occupations and their use is steadily increasing. The risks associated with working with portable devices and systems, for which at present no guidelines exist, differ considerably from those associated with working with visual display units at workstations. The latter are covered by the European VDU Directive and governed by a host of guidelines and recommendations within the EU Member States. In the light of the above, the study addresses the following issues: · To what extent are mobile communication devices used by the working population – how is such use growing in absolute terms and which types of workers are using them? · How is the technology behind these devices – hardware and telecommunications – developing, and how is the technology likely to evolve in the future? · Description of the possible hazards arising from the use of portable computing and communication devices and the risks to workers in terms of ill health and accidents. We also consider how the nature and extent of these risks will change in the future in the light of likely developments in technology and its use. · The implications of the use and development of mobile communication and computing devices for occupational health and safety management and for legislation and implementation in the context of European law concerning health and safety at work. · The scope is limited to work carried out in locations and environments that are impossible or difficult for the employer to control

Globalisation as translation: an approximation to the key but invisible role of translation in globalisation

Two fundamental features of globalisation are the overcoming of spatial barriers and the centrality of knowledge and information. These developments, which result in the increased mobility of people and objects and a heightened contact between different linguistic communities (mass tourism, migration, information and media flows) signal, in spite of the predominance of English as a global lingua franca, an exponential growth in the significance of translation, which becomes a key mediator of global communication. Yet language and translation have been systematically neglected in the current literature on globalisation. This article critically examines current theories of globalisation and interrogates their lack of attention towards translation. It formulates an attempt to understand the significance of translation in a global context, conceptualising its analytical place in globalisation theory and its key role in the articulation of the global and the local

Productivity Challenges in Digital Transformation and its Implications for Workstream Collaboration Tools.

Digital transformation has brought an unprecedented pace of change and a huge amount of information available for businesses. At the same time, it has also created a number of difficulties for knowledge workers that have to deal with increasingly Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) environments. In this scenario, the use of workstream collaboration tools (WSC), such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, to manage this new way of working and to improve the productivity of knowledge workers is proliferating. However, the goals that these WSC tools need to achieve and the way to use them are not well established because of two reasons: (i) these new work environments pose a new set of challenges for working productively that have not been clearly characterised, and (ii) there is neither previous experience nor a strong research body that study them in conjunction to offer guidelines to design good solutions based on WSC tools. In this paper, we follow an inductive approach based on the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from 365 employees of 3 companies (immersed in VUCA environments and digitisation initiatives with WSC tools) to characterise the productivity challenges in these scenarios. The result is a set of 14 challenges that appear with different intensity in each company. A thorough study of the related literature shows that the implication of these challenges in WSC tools have been studied independently, but there is no single theory that covers all of them together. This paper, hence, helps to put them togetherMinisterio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades RTI2018-101204-B-C22 (OPHELIA)Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades RTI2018-101204-B-C21 (HORATIO)Junta de Andalucía EKIPMENTPLUS (P18–FR–2895

Prosperity in crisis and the longue durée in Africa

Understanding the evolution and tenacity of particular ways of envisaging economic growth and development for Africa requires a form of analytical history that examines how conceptual structures function over the longue durée. Such an approach is more than simply empirical analysis through time or a set of abstractions based on the self-understandings of historical agents. It involves the development of a hypothetical analytic structure which through its own forms of transformation eventually comes to play a role in shaping the lived world of participants, including researchers, policymakers and ordinary citizens. This article uses research from Kenya and Zambia to demonstrate how a long-running – but temporally and spatially variable – focus on agricultural productivity has shaped the character of rural life in Africa, and why it has consistently failed to deliver enlarged forms of prosperity based on quality of life and ecological well-being

Productivity Challenges in Digital Transformation and its Implications for Workstream Collaboration Tools

Digital transformation has brought an unprecedented pace of change and a huge amount of information available for businesses. At the same time, it has also created a number of difficulties for knowledge workers that have to deal with increasingly Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) environments. In this scenario, the use of workstream collaboration tools (WSC), such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, to manage this new way of working and to improve the productivity of knowledge workers is proliferating. However, the goals that these WSC tools need to achieve and the way to use them are not well established because of two reasons: (i) these new work environments pose a new set of challenges for working productively that have not been clearly characterised, and (ii) there is neither previous experience nor a strong research body that study them in conjunction to offer guidelines to design good solutions based on WSC tools. In this paper, we follow an inductive approach based on the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from 365 employees of 3 companies (immersed in VUCA environments and digitisation initiatives with WSC tools) to characterise the productivity challenges in these scenarios. The result is a set of 14 challenges that appear with different intensity in each company. A thorough study of the related literature shows that the implication of these challenges in WSC tools have been studied independently, but there is no single theory that covers all of them together. This paper, hence, helps to put them together