By labouring next to manual nightworkers six nights per week and by gathering thick data with a range of methods ranging from non-/participant observation, photo diaries, participatory-action researcher to film documentary and audio recording during interviews, I was able to document in great detail the monotonous night labour processes and the precarity of their living and working conditions. In this piece, I extend that research into the present moment by reconnecting with some of my co-workers. I demonstrate how the overall effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to further amplify the precarity of migrant nightwork. This crisis has presented societies with an opportunity to recognize the essential nature of migrant nightwork and to reflect on its current placement at the lowest level of the labour system. Yet, this opportunity has not been really taken.
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Cite: MacQuarie, J-C. (2020). While Others Sleep: The Essential Labour of the Migrant Nightshift Workers in the UK. Society for the Anthropology of Work. Exertions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21428/1d6be30e.fb029d9b
This article engages with the kind of immersive ethnography that ‘carnal sociology’ has inspired and contributes to the empirically driven theoretisation on the bodies at work (Wacquant 2015, de Souza and Gherardi 2019). It connects space and corporeality in the working life. Moreover, it documents the extent to which nightworkers experience in-work-poverty and social segregation from the rest of the city dwellers due to nature of night work activity. Furthermore, it focuses on the capital regeneration that happens at the expense of workers’ labour capital, i.e., their bodily knowledge and resourcefulness.
Keywords: bodily exhaustion, nightshift work, migrants, sleep despoliation
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Cite: MacQuarie, J-C. (2019). Invisible Migrants: A Micro-Ethnographic Account of Bodily Exhaustion amongst Migrant Manual Labourers Working the Graveyard Shift at the New Spitalfields Market in London. Journal of Health Inequality, 5 (2), 1-5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5114/jhi.2019.91400
Abstract - The main theoretical contribution of this paper is to show that the transitional processes from circadian to post-circadian capitalist era have reduced capabilities for sociability of migrant night shift workers. It analyses the three main contributing factors to the corrosion of solidarity amongst migrant denizens: (a) the expansion of the working day into the night; (b) the major alterations of time over time, and the nurturing ground for these changes, (c) global cities, as the nurturing ground for occupational polarization.
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Abstract - The Field of Psychotherapy has seen a renaissance of mindfulness, the practice of being in the present moment without judgement. Scientific evidence suggests that mindfulness helps to counter Depression and has a beneficial effect on the brain. The martial arts of Eastern origin, which work directly with the body, are as old as mindfulness; can they too be beneficial for mental health? Iulius-Cezar Macarie and Ron Roberts explore this question.
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