Brazilian Steel Town: Machines, Land, Money and Commoning in the Making of the Working Class

Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getúlio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. The city’s economy, and consequently its citizen’s lives, revolves around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest industrial complex in Latin America. Although the glory days of the CSN have long passed, the company still controls life in Volta Redonda today, creating as much dispossession as wealth for the community. Brazilian Steel Town tells the story of the people tied to this ailing giant – of their fears, hopes, and everyday struggles

Steel lives: An ethnography of labour in contemporary Sheffield.

My doctoral research focuses on the experience of labour in a deprived area of Sheffield, UK, where I lived and worked in two steel factories for eighteen months. In my thesis, I study the factory as a physical, economic and political space located between society and the state, and explore how state neo-liberal policies and globalisation affect working class productive and reproductive strategies, and narratives of labour; and reshape the spaces of the factory, the family and the neighbourhood. In the first part of the thesis I reconstruct the history of steel labour on the shopfloor and in the neighbourhood. In Chapter 1, I show that industrial capitalism fragmented the workforce into 'artisans' - skilled casual labourers - and 'proletarians' - unskilled wage workers. In Chapter 2, I show how this fragmentation was reproduced in the neighbourhood by public social and economic policies and by the 'medical discourse' centred on the health of working classes. The two shopfloor ethnographies in Chapter 3 and 4, show that the historical fragmentation between 'artisans' and 'proletarians' is reproduced in the capitalist labour processes today. The neighbourhood ethnographies in Chapter 5 and 6 challenge the hypothesis of 'late capitalism' scholars of the social fragmentation of the artisan-labourers and of the social stability of the families of the aristocracy of labour, and show the relative economic and social stability of the former and the fragility of the productive and reproductive institutions of the latter. I the conclusion I claim that 'late capitalism' does not entail the dissolution of the working class and the consolidation of an aristocracy of labour under the impulse of technological innovation and capital intensification. Rather, it increases both the fragmentation, and the close interaction, between the spaces of wage labour, nuclear families and civil society and the spaces of casual labour, extended families and local politics

Trabalho e ação coletiva

Situada na região sul fluminense, a cidade siderúrgica de Volta Redonda, conhecida internacionalmente, tem um longo histórico de organização e mobilização operária, que se desdobra em termos de seus movimentos populares. O presente trabalho analisa as formas pelas quais militantes dos movimentos sindical e popular constroem suas memórias acerca das mobilizações experimentadas nesse município nas décadas de 1980 e 1990, verificando as representações de cidade que atravessam esse trabalho de memória. Interessa-nos pensar, a partir deste caso, o imbricamento entre memória, espaço e identidades sociais.This article analyses the ways in which labour and social movement activists accounts for the mobilisations experienced in the Volta Redonda city, during the decades 1980 and 1990. We verify the city’s social representation presented in these accounts. Situated in the Southern region of the Rio de Janeiro State, this internationally known steel city has got a enduring history of labour organisation and collective action. Focusing in that case one can deal with the memory, space and social identities embeddedness. Guided by labour anthropology issues, the empirical data resulted from field observation and oral history methodology

Flexible industrial work in the European periphery: factory regimes and changing working class cultures in the Spanish steel industry

This article explores how two steel industry firms operating in northern Spain have adapted to neoliberalism and globalization. Despite their geographical proximity, the comparison between their different trajectories, production, and ownership profiles highlights how their distinct factory regimes, while becoming entangled in global market dynamics, have allowed the emergence of contrasting definitions of workers’ identities, labor politics, and livelihood strategies, raising questions concerning (1) processes of distribution of privileges, skills, and knowledge among the workforce, and (2) the shaping of social relations, values, and meanings that result in the formation of particular factory regimes. The unequal position of steelmaking in regional economies, and the effects of economic policies that framed social relations in each firm, evince important differences between them, including contrasting expressions of resistance, discipline, and sociality on the shop floor. Our comparison considers how particular factory regimes bring forward different prospects as these firms face further industrial transformation, restructuring, and an increasingly uncertain future

Observation, performance and revolution: exploring “the political” in visual art and anthropology

Following up on Marcus's seminal article on cinema and ethnography [1995] and weaving together anthropology, film theory and the analysis of four films—from the ethnographic, commercial, art and documentary genres—I argue that cinema can open a democratic and egalitarian space of observation of and interaction with “the other” and that anthropologists should approach their subjects in ways similar to some other filmmakers. But unlike Marcus, who considers films as metaphors of ethnography and advocates a posture of modernist distance, I look for juxtapositions between film and anthropology and, extending the Surrealist notion of “the double” across the fields of politics and aesthetics, I argue for a humanist anthropology, one that celebrates the dual nature of humans and cinema

Made in Sheffield. An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics.

In 1900, Sheffield was the tenth largest city in the world. Cutlery “made in Sheffield” was used across the globe, and the city built armored plate for the navy in the run-up to the First World War. Today, however, Sheffield’s derelict Victorian shop floors and industrial buildings are hidden behind new leisure developments and shopping centers. Based on an extended period of research in two local steel factories, this book combines a lively, descriptive account with a wide-ranging critique of post-industrial capitalism. Its central argument is that recent government attempts to engineer Britain’s transition to a post-industrial and classless society have instead created volatile post-industrial spaces marked by informal labor, industrial sweatshops and levels of risk and deprivation that divide citizens along lines of gender, age, and class. The author discovers a link between production and reproduction, and demonstrates the centrality of kinship relations, child and female labor, and intra-household exchanges to the economic process of de-industrialization. Paradoxically, government policies have reinvigorated working-class militancy, spawned local industrial clusters and re-embedded the economy in the spatial and social structure of the neighborhood

Anthropology and class. A view from a Brazilian barrio (9. Working-class politics in a Brazilian steel town)

Rising social, political and economic inequality in many countries, and rising protest against it, has seen the restoration of the concept of 'class' to a prominent place in contemporary anthropological debates. A timely intervention in these discussions, this book explores the concept of class and its importance for understanding the key sources of that inequality and of people's attempts to deal with it. Highly topical, it situates class within the context of the current economic crisis, integrating elements from today into the discussion of an earlier agenda. Using cases from North and South America, Western Europe and South Asia, it shows the - sometimes surprising - forms that class can take, as well as the various effects it has on people's lives and societies

Organisational control as cultural practice – a shop floor ethnography of a Sheffield steel mill

Field studies of management control and accounting have tended to study organisational meaning through practices. We identify three strands of practice research on organisational control (viz., governmentality, actor network theory, and accountability) and propose a forth: cultural practice. The study of control as cultural practice is grounded in observation because it conceives of cultural knowledge as practical and largely extra-linguistic. It conceptualises organisational control as an effect of the actions and ideas of organisational members beyond the ranks of management, thus widening the field of empirical inquiry. It also makes studies of steady state organisations more attractive thereby opening the possibility that the assemblages of people, purposes, and technologies, which give rise to specific forms of organisational control, may be understood as less ephemeral than, particularly, studies of governmentality and actor network theory have suggested. Our ethnography of a steel mill in Sheffield is based on 11 months of participant observation on the shop floors of the hot and cold departments. We argue that the subcultures of different shop floors were constituted in practices of control which enabled organisational members to pursue diverse objectives that were related to their various wider cultural aspirations. Organisational control practices relied on diverse accountings and accounts of organisational actions and purposes. Whilst we found considerable diversity between subcultures, we also found that individual subcultures, and the tensions and contradictions within them, exhibited much continuity. The ability of studies of organisational subcultures to bring out the diversity as well as continuity of practices holds considerable potential for our understanding of organisational control

ARTCOMMONS. The Legacy of Nam June Paik for the Museum of the Commons

NJP Reader #8 – Future Museum: Public to Commons Nam June Paik Art Center hosted the 2018 International Symposium, ‘The Gift of Nam June Paik 10’ from October 12th to 13th under the title, Future Museum: From Public to Commons. The international symposium series, ‘The Gift of Nam June Paik’ also welcomed its 10th anniversary and it has been designed to review the past decade of Nam June Paik Art Center. Experimenting the ‘commons model’ as a new ontology to unfold as well as a communication method, the symposium initiated from thinking about ‘after the future’, and examined the political, aesthetic, economic and technical conditions necessary to become the commons, and further discuss the practical measures of the commons movement, currently occurring in the art scene worldwide. The outcomes of the symposium are presented in the form to be shared by anyone and will be rich sources for thinking about a future museum. According to Nam June Paik, thinking about the future is the role of the artist. Ultimately, anyone can think about the future and be an artist