Refugee Resettlement Agencies in the United States make headlines because of the people they help, but what about the immigrant support providers doing the work? In Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts there are organizations that open their doors to newly arrived people needing assistance. The purpose of this case study was to explore the experience of working as a resettlement provider for immigrants in Massachusetts between 2016 and 2021. I argue that Donald Trump’s policy decisions were a form of structural violence against and experienced by the resettlement organizations contracted to the federal government to assist refugees. Preliminary literature reviews showed research on refugees was saturated. A few articles discussed psychological impacts on providers in a clinical setting or presented quantitative analyses of immigration statistics. My research is a novel ethnographic case study of the resettlement organizations. This study was conducted over three years during the COVID-19 pandemic. I examined the effect of changes to the body-politic, the social-body, and the body-self levels of experience. By using a holistic model of health, I connect these experiences to the physical, social, and psychological dimensions of wellbeing. Throughout the fourth chapter, I argue that Trump’s pernicious executive policy decisions were intentional acts of violent against resettlement organizations across the United States. The anti-immigrant rhetoric in the media and policies, combined with increased xenophobia withdrew vital physical and social resources for providers. This created a shift in the hegemonic forces in the United States that impacted organization and refugees alike. Chapter Five argues that Massachusetts resettlement organizations were impacted through implicit effects at the state and community levels. As the pressure of their work increased and their community relationship became more complicated, their precarity was compounded by COVID-19. This is illustrated through the starvation of the social-body and subsequent re-feeding they experienced. Finally, Chapter Six argues that individual resettlement providers experienced a state of precarious wellbeing. They had to develop creative coping mechanisms to work through the precarity after being flooded with new arrivals. The providers embodied this precarity on a personal level, though not passively. They pushed back against the Trump Administration’s violence through interagency legal action, solid community partnerships, and individual coping mechanisms.

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Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Bedeutung und Auswirkungen von Plattformarbeit in Westeuropa und Nordamerika. Dafür werden die Zusammenhänge zwischen drei Ebenen untersucht: Erstens die Gestaltung des Arbeitsmodells als Mesoebene, zweitens bestehende Arbeitsmarktentwicklungen und nationale Regulierungskontexte als Makroebene, sowie drittens das Leben und Erleben des Arbeitsmodells von Plattformarbeiter*innen als Mikroebene. Die empirische Untersuchung konzentriert sich auf Crowdwork als ortsunabhängige Form von Plattformarbeit. Zudem wird eine Triangulation von qualitativen und quantitativen Forschungsmethoden sowie eine komparative Perspektive zwischen unterschiedlichen Aufgabenkomplexitäten (Mikro- und Makroaufgaben) und institutionellen Kontexten (Deutschland und USA) genutzt. Die Mehrebenenuntersuchung zeigt, dass Plattformarbeit auf der Mesoebene eine arbeitsorganisatorische Innovation darstellt, die auf der Makro- und Mikroebene an bestehende Entwicklungen anknüpft. Auf der Mesoebene zeigen sich vielfältigere und komplexere Ansätze der Arbeitsorganisation und Arbeitskontrolle als häufig angenommen. Auf der Makroebene knüpft Plattformarbeit an bestehende Prozesse der Auslagerung, Flexibilisierung und Prekarisierung von Arbeit, wobei der nationale Regulierungskontext weiterhin prägend ist. Auf der Mikroebene zeigt sich, dass die Heterogenität der Plattformarbeiter*innen und das hohe Maß an Eigenverantwortung ihre Individualisierung befördert. Die vorliegende Arbeit schlussfolgert, dass eine Plattformisierung der Arbeitswelt keineswegs gegeben ist. Die Bedeutung von Plattformarbeit wird insbesondere darin verortet, dass es die weitere Ausbreitung und Ausdifferenzierung von prekären Erwerbsformen auf der Makroebene und die Individualisierung von prekär Erwerbstätigen auf der Mikroebene befördert. Die vorliegende Arbeit verortet in dieser Vielfalt an Prekarität und Individualisierung der Prekären eine Form von Herrschaft. / This study examines the importance and consequences of platform work in Western Europe and North America. To this end, the connections between three levels are examined: First, the design of the work model as the meso level, second, existing labour market developments and national regulatory contexts as the macro level, and third, the forms of use and perceptions of platform workers as the micro level. The empirical investigation focuses on crowdwork as a location-independent form of platform work. Furthermore, the study uses a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative research methods as well as a comparative perspective between different task complexities (micro and macro tasks) and institutional contexts (Germany and USA). The multi-level investigation shows that platform work represents an innovation at the meso level that reflects and reinforces existing developments at the macro and micro levels. At the meso level, more diverse and complex approaches to work organization and control emerge than is often assumed. At the macro level, platform work reflects and reinforces processes of outsourcing, flexibilization and precarisation of work, though the national regulatory context remains a central factor. At the micro level, the heterogeneity of platform worker and the high degree of personal responsibility promotes their individualization. The study concludes that a platformisation of work is far from certain. The study attributes the importance of platform work to the fact that it promotes the further spread and differentiation of precarious employment at the macro level and the individualization of precarious workers at the micro level. The study identifies this variety of precarity and individualization of the precarious as a form of domination.

This thesis analyzes class experiences of workers under flexible and precarious conditions of global neoliberal capitalism and tries to answer to what extent these conditions erode their capacities to develop antagonistic class consciousness and collective struggles. Specifically, based on a fieldwork consisting of semi-structured in-depth interviews with 24 workers living in slums of Istanbul, it deals with cultural analysis of working and daily-life experiences of workers involved in the global production of garments. Three categories of analysis are used: experiences of shame, time and necessity, which respectively suggest that, under conditions of precarity and flexibility, the workers, 1. perceive their class positions as personal and feel themselves inadequate, leading to questioning of self-worth, injuries in the self and individual - but not collective - emancipation attempts to escape from the injuring effects of class / 2. have lost not only their control over their present time through extremely long and irregular working hours / but also are ripped of their capacity to plan/organize their future / 3. live under the burden of continuous and persistent concern over necessities, which results in deep-seated sense of deprivation, impoverishment of life experiences, lack of meaning in this life, killing of hopes and consequentially experience of powerlessness. Yet, despite all these alienating experiences, there are also inchoate seeds of revolt and an alternative worldview, which confirms that class struggle exists even &ndash / and indeed (!) &ndash / in most severe conditions of alienation and will be decisive on the emancipatory dialectics of alienation / nonalienation and making / unmaking of class.

Surrogacy is an arrangement whereby a woman conceives in order to give birth to child or children for another individual or couple to raise. This thesis explores how commercial gestational surrogacy is culturally framed and socially organised in Russia and investigates the roles of the key actors. In particular it explores the experiences of surrogacy workers, including those who migrate or commute long distances within and to Russia for surrogacy work and the significance of their origin, citizenship, ethnicity and religion in shaping their experience. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in St Petersburg between August 2014 and May 2015 and involved semi-structured interviews, (participant) observations, informal conversations and ethnographic fieldnotes with 33 surrogacy workers, 7 client parents, 15 agency staff and 11 medical staff in medical and surrogacy agency facilities. Data were analysed using inductive ethnographic principles. A reflexive account, which includes a consideration of the utility of making one’s own emotional responses a research tool, is also included. Drawing on and expanding on Colen’s (1995) conceptual framework of stratified reproduction and Crenshaw’s (1989) analytical framework of intersectionality, this research shows that surrogacy in Russia is culturally framed and therefore socially organised as an economic exchange, which gives rise to and reinforces different forms of intersecting reproductive stratifications. These stratifications include biological, social, geographic, geo-political and ethnic dimensions. Of particular novelty is the extension of Colen’s framework to address geographic and geo political stratifications. This was based on the finding that some women (temporarily) migrate or commute (over long distances) to work as gestational carriers. The thesis also demonstrates how an economic framing of surrogacy induced surrogacy workers to understand surrogacy gestation as work, which influenced their relationships with client parents. Given the rapid global increase in the use of surrogacy and its increasingly internationalised nature, this research into the social organisation of commercial gestational surrogacy in Russia is timely and has implications for users, medical practitioners and regulators, as well as researchers concerned with (cross-border) surrogacy and reproductive justice.

This project, based on a study of television producers in Colombia, is an ethnographic exploration of the working conditions of cultural production within a highly contextualized environment such as public service television under state control, using Señal Colombia TV channel as case study. I examine how cultural production is affected by governmental structures and dynamics, whilst exploring the conditions and processes of public service television production, and how television producers experience these processes at an individual level. My primary question is to determine how the production of public service television under state control impacts producers’ practices and perceptions regarding the value and outcomes of their work. In this context, precariousness, autonomy, good work, power and public value have emerged as central areas of constant tension. I link issues regarding cultural work and public value in a media production analysis, obtaining direct empirical data that provides an in-depth description of the current public media production context under state control in Colombia. To explore these intersections, the project brings together interviews, focus groups, and participant observation. The findings exposed that the internal dynamics of both the nation and the organisation significantly affect the concept of public value, making it an ambivalent, uncertain and ill-defined notion. Where governance is state-driven, workers, regardless of their role, subscribe to dominant narratives and discourses that justify their work, and thus contribute to keeping themselves under prescribed creativity. In general, the present study provides a holistic account of cultural work study, focusing on what occurs to cultural work in various contexts of control, and the individual reactions to these contexts. The analysis of cultural work in this context, also broadens current knowledge on the concepts of network sociality and good work under clientelism, and in a non-free-market.

Que signifie « Faire de l'humanitaire en France » ? Cette thèse se concentre sur un dispositif proposé et réalisé, en France, par une association médicale humanitaire, Médecins du Monde, et qui insiste sur la prise en charge de la santé des populations en situation de précarité. Soigner les populations précaires, et témoigner de leur situation, tel est le rôle que s'est assigné cette association. A partir d'une enquête comparative de quatre structures de l'association dans des villes françaises, cette étude de cas analyse et explique la spécificité de l'action humanitaire médicale et son articulation avec le système officiel de santé au niveau local, au niveau national français et son extension au niveau européen. L'analyse concrète du travail associatif, au sein de réseaux d'action publique et auprès de publics cibles (les migrants, les Roms et les SDF), permet de dresser un modèle des organisations privées non marchandes qui participent aux politiques publiques en France aujourd'hui. Les modes d'intervention employés par l'acteur associatif permettent de réinterroger la place des initiatives associatives et de les envisager comme constitutives du système français de protection sociale. / This Ph-D thesis focuses on a system provided, in France, by an humanitarian and medical NGO, Doctor of the World, which takes responsibility for the health of the precariousness populations. Heal the poorest and provide evidence : this is the action this NGO proposes. It is based on extensive fieldwork in four associative structures in France. This case analyses and explain the particularity of the humanitarian action and its articulation with the French health-care system in a local level, in a national level and its extension in the European level. The practical associative work, in political networks and centred to specified population (migrants, Roma and homeless people), highlights a model of non-profit organizations which participate to public policies in France. From the methods of intervention proposed by this NGO, this thesis examines the place of associative initiatives and wonders if whether or not they are constituent of the French health-care system.

This dissertation examines urban walking in Canada as it deviates from a largely male peripatetic tradition associated with the flâneur. This new incarnation of the walker—differentiated by gender, race, class, and/or sexual orientation—reshapes the urban imaginary and shifts the act of walking from what is generally theorized as an individualistic or simply transgressive act to a relational and transformative practice. While the walkers in this study are diverse, the majority of them are women: writers Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, Régine Robin, Gail Scott, and Lisa Robertson and performance artists Kinga Araya, Stephanie Marshall, and Camille Turner all challenge the dualism inscribed by the dominant (masculine) gaze under the project of modernity that abstracts and objectifies the other. Yet, although sexual difference is often the first step toward rethinking identities and relationships to others and the city, it is not the last. I argue that poet Bud Osborn, the play The Postman, the projects Ogimaa Mikana, [murmur] and Walking With Our Sisters, and community initiatives such as Jane’s Walk, also invite all readers and pedestrians to question the equality, official history and inhabitability of Canadian cities. As these peripatetic works emphasize, how, where and why we choose to walk is a significant commentary on the nature of public space and democracy in contemporary urban Canada. This interdisciplinary study focuses on Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, cities where there has been not only some of the greatest social and economic change in Canada under neoliberalism but also the greatest concentration of affective, peripatetic practices that react to these changes. The nineteenth-century flâneur’s pursuit of knowledge is no longer adequate to approach the everyday reality of the local and contingent effects of global capitalism. As these walkers reject an oversimplified and romanticized notion of belonging to a city or nation based on normative identity categories, they recognize the vulnerability of others and demand that cities be more than locations of precarity and economic growth. This dissertation critically engages diverse Canadian peripatetic perspectives notably absent in theories of urban walking and extends them in new directions. Although the topic of walking suggests an anthropocentrism that contradicts the turn to posthumanism in literary and cultural studies, the walkers in this study open the peripatetic up to non-anthropocentric notions as the autonomous subject of liberal individualism often associated with the male urban walking tradition is displaced by a new focus on the interdependent, affective relation of self and city and on attending to others, to the care of and responsibility for others and the city.