The topic of this diploma thesis is the ways of harmonization of harmonization of scientific work and care in the context of the transformation of science. The author aims to describe the transformation of the institutional aspects of scientific work and its'reflection in the biographies of women scientists. At first the author focuses on the insight into the history of science to map participation of women on the scientific inquiry and to describe the transformation of science. Afterwards she moves her focus towards the actual discourse of equal chances for men and women in science, which high lightens contradictory pressures of the standards of scientific work and motherhood that women in science must face. In the main part of the paper the results of a qualitative survey conducted by the author are presented. The author came to a conclusion that even though the gender stereotypes on men's' and women's' role in science and family are still persisting some progress towards the equality of men and women in science has been made. On the other hand the transformation of scientific work is posing new threat of insecurity of the scientific work that is grounded in the principles of free market Keywords: Science, women, transformation of science, precarity

Thesis advisor: Carlo Rotella / This country currently finds itself in a backwards way. Since the late 1970s, our policy choices have led to a significant disparity between national economic productivity and individual workers’ pay. As GDP steadily grew between 1979 and 2020, wages remained largely stagnant and many Americans now find themselves incapable of keeping up with rising costs of living. Unlike most workers struggling in this precarious economy, college students graduating from elite universities are given the choice to embark on careers in financial and consulting sectors to achieve financial stability. That stability can only be achieved through only a handful of work-options, however, can feel restrictive to many college students, meaning this new America of limited opportunity is not felt exclusively by the working class and instead can be intuited at every class level. Over the course of one dissolute summer, I sought to better understand why many students, despite having the option to work lucrative jobs, feel pessimistic about working after graduation. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: English.

To promote their desired national identity, the North Macedonian government funded the Skopje 2014 Project––an initiative including abundant statues, architectural façades, and other structures that depict Ancient Macedon as North Macedonia’s heritage. This project received copious amounts of criticism on two central fronts: first, that its allusions to Ancient Macedon are a false depiction of history; second, that its aesthetic is tacky. While valid arguments are made on each of these fronts, I argue that the latter complicates the former when analyzed in the context of North Macedonia’s precarity. In this analysis, I employ the work of Judith Butler and Liron Lavi as a theoretical backdrop to interrogate the nature of North Macedonia’s precarity. Analyzing political negotiations between North Macedonia and Greece surrounding Skopje 2014, I introduce the term persistent infelicity––a type of precarity in which the validity of an identity performance is made inaccessible for a given entity. Further, the commodification of the Ancient Macedon narrative has transformed North Macedonia’s identity performance from an iterative production to an instantaneous transaction, limiting North Macedonia’s opportunity to challenge its infelicitous state. However, I assert that the aesthetic of Skopje 2014 creates space for subversion even considering these limitations. Expanding upon the work of Susan Sontag, I identify Skopje 2014’s aesthetic as camp and delineate its function in the project as one of subversive compliance. Camp as a rhetorical tool allows North Macedonia to perform a bifurcated identity—one identity that is insincere yet appeases its international audience and another that is more authentic yet controversial directed toward an intra-national audience. While this has modestly empowering implications for Skopje 2014, this analysis concludes that the identity performance of North Macedonia has been propelled into the realm of simulacra—a realm ultimately and perilously untethered to the “real”––and prompts further consideration for other precarious nations whose identities may be fated to persistent infelicity.

This study examines whether front-of-house workers' experiences of emotional labor affected their turnover intentions while working a food service job during COVID. To investigate, I asked a sample of 14 tipped workers and two general managers about their experiences working in restaurants during the lockdown and reopening phases of COVID. I learned about participants' experiences working and their reasons for staying and quitting their job during the reopening phases. From interviews, I collected data on workers' perceptions of health mandates, their customer interactions, and their own assessments of COVID-related risks. I analyzed interview data to assess how organizational changes during COVID affected workers' performances of emotional labor and whether their reasons for leaving related to emotional labor being altered. Findings show that workers had to manage customers' heightened emotions while handling their own. From decreased income, increased negative emotions, and mask interference, workers' experiences of emotional labor were significantly changed. Importantly, organizational changes made many workers uncomfortable in their workplace and in following organizational demands, both related and unrelated to emotional labor. These experiences led seven participants to ultimately quit and six to desire to quit without doing so. I conclude that emotional labor was intensified for workers' whose wage predominantly rested on their capitalization of interactions with customers. Evidence reveals how organizational changes led to increased feelings of stress, emotional burnout, and exhaustion. However, the widespread occurrence of these feelings and intensified emotional labor make it unclear whether increased and intensified emotional labor directly created or heavily influenced desires to quit. / Master of Science / My project aims to ask restaurant workers about their experiences working through COVID. Many people called workers "lazy" or complained about them quitting to use government assistance. However, I believe that workers quit for reasons unrelated to individual laziness or reliance on assistance. To investigate, I asked front of house restaurant workers about their experiences interacting with customers and their job conditions. I also asked them what it was like for them, as restaurant workers, to enforce mandates while trying to keep a customer happy for a tip. I interviewed 16 people that worked in a restaurant between November 2020-2021. I chose this period because during this year millions of workers were quitting their jobs. After interviewing workers, I analyzed what they said to see whether interactions with customers and their efforts to maintain tips pushed them to desire quitting. I found that workers' experiences in restaurants were changed greatly by COVID. Specifically, their incomes decreased, interactions were seriously impacted by the mask, and work became more emotionally exhausting. Many of the workers I interviewed wanted to quit while working with a mask on their face. It was clear that working during COVID was the only option for many of the workers I interviewed, and it often cost them their mental health and well-being to stay financially stable.

This study explores the Great Resignation—a mass wave of voluntary job departures during and after the COVID-19 pandemic— through a Foucauldian lens, exploring the intersections of neoliberal labor practices, worker subjectivities, and discursive power. Using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) 25 interviews with individuals who resigned during this period were analyzed to explore how workers engage with neoliberal discourses in making sense of their work-related attitudes, experiences, and decisions as well as the broader discursive constructions used to interpret the Great Resignation as a societal phenomenon. Participants’ narratives reveal varying degrees of alignment, negotiation, and resistance to neoliberal subjectivity, shaped by discourses of responsibilization, individualization, entrepreneurialism while also reflecting moments of critique and resistance. Beyond personal experiences, participants’ discussions revealed five discursive constructions of the Great Resignation —'The Lazy Worker,' 'Leveraging Opportunity,' 'Decentering Work,' 'Navigating Precarity,' and 'Empowered Workers'—reflecting a contested discursive site and exposing the interplay between neoliberal rationalities and workers’ attempts to navigate, critique, and reimagine the labor market. These findings situate the Great Resignation as a site of both discursive rupture and continuity, highlighting the complex interplay of governance and agency, where the neoliberal framework is simultaneously resisted, reproduced, and reimagined. This research advances sociological understandings of neoliberal power, discourse, and subjectivity, illustrating how governmentality shapes individual experiences and subjectivities and broader perceptions of labor, as the Great Resignation marks a contested reconfiguration of work, power, and identity under neoliberal capitalism.

2023 / This dissertation explores the intersections of peculiarity, precarity, and spatiality in private security work in Istanbul. Emerging relatively recently in 2004, Turkey's contractual private security industry has grown exponentially, becoming one of the largest in Europe and a "safe haven" for job seekers attempting to escape the rising employment precarity in the broader labor market. Focusing on the service, servers, and spaces of security, this research offers a multi-sited ethnographic analysis of security's economization within Turkey's private security industry, looking into three key sites: an airport, a hospital, and a gated residential community. Initially, the study investigates how space shapes the economization of security as a peculiar good. Drawing on economic sociology literature, it expands the current understanding of peculiar goods by focusing on micro-level processes of translation of these peculiar goods into market objects. In doing so, it argues for the formative role of space in framing, providing, and delivering security within the private security industry. The study then shifts its focus from the service to the servers, analyzing the precarious nature of work within this industry. It identifies four forms of precarity - employment, legal, organizational, and relational - that shape the uncertainties, instabilities, and insecurities experienced by private security industry workers. This dissertation challenges the precarity literature's tendency to reduce work to employment and advocates for a practical and pragmatic analysis of work. Lastly, the study builds upon the multidimensional approach to work precarity proposed earlier and investigates the variation of work precarity experiences within the industry. It provides a comparative ethnographic exploration of how space shapes work precarity experiences across three distinct sites. By doing so, it underscores the spatial embeddedness of work precarity experiences of private security guards. Consequently, this research contributes to the precarity literature by considering work's practical and spatial nature. / 2027-01-30T00:00:00Z

Over the last decade, each year 2500 - 6000 Thai go to Sweden to work as berry pickers during the berry season via a regulated system of temporary work permits. Bangkok-based staffing agencies rely on the networks of local brokers to recruit workers in Thailand’s more peripheral northeastern Isan region, as part of the larger migration industry in Thailand. During the berry season, these local brokers also travel to Sweden and are part of the division of labour. Next to picking berries, their jobs can be cook, camp leader, and driver. Key concerns raised in relation to this seasonal work are precarity and vulnerability to exploitation, resulting from to the need to pay high fees to staffing agencies and a piece-rate wage-system. This thesis aims to analyze roles and positions across time and space of local Thai brokers. It does so by examining how they have come to occupy their current positions, and what their roles are in the recruitment process in Thailand and during the during the berry season in Sweden. Moreover, it investigates the interlinkages between these two roles, and how differences in remuneration and payments of fees shape precarity at the micro-scale. Based on the analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted in the Kaeng Khro district in Thailand in March 2019, this study suggests that the local brokers are industry veterans. Moreover, is suggests a large degree of variation in size and scope of local brokerage. During the berry season in Sweden, the local brokers tend to occupy positions above the regular berry pickers. Moreover, it is suggested that there is a differentiated precarity within the group of brokers, resulting from differences in the payment of wages and the need to pay fees to staffing agencies.

Esta pesquisa observa a relação entre migrantes transnacionais e dinâmicas urbanas na cidade de São Paulo, através de uma observação etnográfica participante e móvel, e da análise de trajetórias habitacionais de migrantes que passaram por diferentes tipos de ocupações de moradia. Desenvolvem-se as hipóteses de que migrantes, assim como não migrantes, são atores urbanos cuja relação com a cidade engendra agenciamentos, redes e alianças que resultam em diferentes formas de ação política transnacionalizada. A investigação demonstra que a presença migrante em ocupações é resultado de situações próprias da vida urbana, na qual há uma distribuição desigual da condição precária e deslocamentos cada vez maiores e mais frequentes de migrantes e não migrantes dentro e através das cidades. Nesse sentido, argumenta-se sobre a necessidade de se tomar a cidade como plano de referência para compreensão das mobilidades transnacionais de modo a observar, inclusive, os agenciamentos ao redor de categorias jurídico-políticas e identidades étnicas e nacionais. A pesquisa demonstra que a relação de migrantes com a cidade resulta em pontos de inflexão e entrecruzamentos nas trajetórias habitacionais dos atores, assim como em modificações no tecido social e nos próprios espaços - alguns deles funcionando como potentes conectores urbanos. Destaca-se que, nestes contextos, surgem conexões de interdependência e ações políticas que desafiam a condição precária e ao mesmo tempo colocam em xeque tanto a moral humanitária quanto a noção do migrante empreendedor de si mesmo. Nesse sentido, a investigação busca contribuir a uma compreensão mais heterogênea e menos excepcionalista da experiência migrante na cidade e aponta para a necessidade de uma agenda de pesquisa pós-nacional comprometida com a emergência de diferentes tipos de movimentos de resistência transnacionalizados. / This research observes the relationship between transnational migrants and urban dynamics in the city of São Paulo, through a participant and movel ethnographic observation, and the analysis of migrants\' housing pathways that crossed ocupações (squats). The hypothesis developed are that that migrants, as well as non-migrants, are urban actors whose relaonship with the city engenders agency, networks and alliances that result in different forms of transnational political action. The research shows that the migrant presence in ocupações is a result of urban life situations, in which there is an uneven distribution of precarity and increasing and more frequent displacements of migrants and non migrants within and through cities. In this sense, this work argues about the need to consider the city as the plane of reference for a proper understanding of transnational mobilities, which even allows the observance of the agencies around juridical-political categories and ethnic and national identities. This research shows that the relationship of migrants with the city results in inflection points and intersections in the housing pathways of the actors, as well as in changes in the social fabric and in the spaces themselves - some of them functioning as powerful urban connectors. It is noteworthy that, in these contexts, there are connections of interdependence and political actions that challenge the precarious condition and at the same time put in question both the humanitarian morality and the notion of the entrepreneurial migrant. In this sense, the research seeks to contribute to a more heterogeneous and less exceptionalist understanding of the migrant experience in the city, and it points to the need for a post-national research agenda that is committed to the emergence of different types of transnationalized resistance movements.

During the recent years in Turkey, the word &ldquo / apache&rdquo / had taken its place in Turkish popular culture as a pejorative word that is used to label a group of slum-dweller, working class youth. Those young people are distinguished through their visual styles, music consumption, and everyday activities that form a subculture. This thesis, firstly, is an attempt to understand the material, social and cultural circumstances which produce this subculture. Secondly, the thesis seeks to analyze the cultural reflections of these circumstances into the subculture that is emerging. As an attempt to understand that process, a four months media survey and a ten months field research with in-depth interviews and participant observation was conducted with the members of this subculture in Ankara-Turkey. As a result of the media survey and the field research it was observed that the most dominant factor that leads to/produces this subculture is the precarious working conditions that these youths are embedded. The members of that subculture are composed of the young members of the working class who enter into labor market under the &lsquo / internalized&rsquo / conditions of precarity. They consistently, experience employment under the precarious working conditions and unemployment. Therefore, they occupy a liminal and marginalized position in which they neither articulate to their class position nor depart from it. Their ambiguous position in the relations of production redounds on their cultural practices. They create a subculture both through the mediation of their socio-economically obscure position and as a cultural response to it. They seek to construct a new position through the survival strategies and daily tactics in the realm of cultural practices / through a subculture in which they can define and situate themselves within the bounds of possibilities of their material conditions. However, this subculture also constitutes a continuum with their material conditions and consolidates their liminality. They are labeled as Apaches in that subculture and experience a similar kind of a marginalization with their counterpart precarious youth in all around the world. This thesis examines that subculture in which the cultural reflections of young people to precarity became concrete.

By using contemorary work-theory this thesis aim to show how Yarden. En berättelse, puts into play the circumstances of precarian work, circumstances that have gender political as well as identity political overtones. It tries to show how the idea of ”class-jouney” is used as a conciliatory element. An element that, acitvitated increasingly towards the end of the text, is significant for the selfs posisiton in relationship to his class identity and the workers collective around him as well as other spheres. It is also significant in relationship to the work which is the writing, and to the product of that work, which is both Yarden and the litterary persona produced by Yarden. This is something that I try to trace to a conflict between class belonging and other identitory political projects that Yarden expresses. The reality which is produced by the text is not only a staging of a litterary persona and the following class-journey. In my thesis I try to show that it is also possible to read it in it self as something that gives us valuable insights on how reality is produced under the circumstances of precarity. Insights that in turn can show us both how the supression of labour is organised in contemporary late-capitalism, and what expressions resistance in turn might take.