Introduction to “Laboring from ex-centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity, and Work”

Abstract

The transition to industrial regimes has produced new categories of people deemed “unfit” for labor. Even if these boundaries are more porous nowadays, contributions to this Special Issue reveal continuities in how people struggle for a place in domains of work that are ill-shaped to accommodate their diverse bodyminds. Drawing on disability/chronicity cases from India, Germany, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil/Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States, authors in this issue study how people navigate and reshape the boundaries between labor, care, and recognition. Based on these insights, this introduction calls for scholarly engagement with visions of work as they emerge from what Faye Harrison calls ex-centric sites, i.e., viewing the margins of normative labor regimes as analytical loci for knowledge creation. We consider work not only in the context of how capitalist and biomedical systems produce debilitation and moral distinction but also as a transformative sphere, irreducible to predominant categories of employment and productivity. Bridging between medical/disability anthropology, critical disability studies, and the anthropology of work, we call for an expansive understanding of work and theory-building from neglected positionings within labor economies.