Global Labour, Activism and Social Justice Cluster

The Global Labour, Activism and Social Justice Cluster is a research network focusing on the global political economy of production and work; on global activism and social justice; global labour standards and politics; and the interrelations of all these themes with intersecting inequalities of gender, race, and class.

Situated in the SOAS department of Development Studies, but also including colleagues and students from the SOAS Department of Economics, the cluster is organised as a vibrant inclusive space for intellectual reflection and collective analysis, and it promotes teaching and research collaborations on its core themes. Cluster members engage in detailed empirical research focusing on a vast number of regions, including East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Current research streams include:

• Global Supply Chain Capitalism, Labour regimes and Standards
• Feminist Political Economy and Social Reproduction
• Work in the age of COVID-19
• Urban Development and the Gig-Economy
• Racial Capitalism and Decolonial Approaches to Labour in Development
• Feminist Political Ecology and Labour
• Labour Activism and Social Justice Movements

Our research has theoretical, political and policy relevance, and we work with several UN organisations, international and local NGOs, civil society organisations and labour and social justice movements, and community groups. These include the ILO, War on Want, Labour Behind the Labour, Clean Clothes Campaign, Fashion Revolution, among others. We are committed to creating more equitable research partnerships in development research, recognising how colonial relationships can be reproduced through project design, funding modalities, and institutional structures of higher education.

The cluster’s research informs teaching across a great variety of department’s programmes and courses, and it has also informed summer schools at SOAS and abroad.

• Baglioni, E., Campling, L., Mezzadri, A., Miyamura, S., Pattenden, J. and Selwyn, B. (2022) "Exploitation and Labour Regimes: Production, Circulation, Social Reproduction, Ecology" in: Baglioni, Elena, Campling, Liam, Coe, Neil M., and Smith, Adrian, (eds.), Labour Regimes and Global Production. Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, pp 81-100.
• Bargawi, H., Alami, R. and Ziada, H. (2022) "Re-negotiating Social Reproduction, Work and Gender Roles in Occupied Palestine." Review of International Political Economy, 29 (6). pp. 1917-1944.
• Bhattacharya, S., Kesar S. and Mehra S. (2022) "Exclusion, Surplus Population, and the Labour Question in Postcolonial Capitalism: Future Directions in Political Economy of Development". Review of Political Economy.
• Kesar, S, Bhattacharya S. and Banerjee L. (2022) "Contradictions and Crisis in the World of Work: Informality, Precarity and the Pandemic" Development and Change.
• Mezzadri, A. (2022) "The Social Reproduction of Pandemic Surplus Populations and Global Development Narratives on Inequality and Informal Labour" Development and Change
• Mezzadri, A. and Banerjee K. (2022) "When the Lewisian Dream Sours: Industrial Aspirations and Reverse Labour Migration" Journal of South Asian Development, 17 (3). pp. 297-326
• Miyamura, S. (2021) "Turbulence ahead: labour and struggles in times of the Covid-19 pandemic in India" Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue Canadienne d'études du développement (42), 1/2, pp 165-177.
• Oya, C. (2022) "Doing labour regime research with large-scale surveys in Africa" In: Baglioni, Elena and Campling, Liam and Coe, Neil and Smith, Adrian, (eds.), Labour Regimes and Global Production. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing, pp 101-119. 
• Oya, C. and Schaefer, F. (2021) "The politics of labour relations in global production networks: collective action, industrial parks, and local conflict in the Ethiopian apparel sector" World Development, (146) 105564. 
• Pringle, T. (2021) "The Unionisation Wave in Hong Kong: The Noise before Defeat or the Route to Victory?" Global Labour Journal 12 (2).
• Pringle, T. and Meng, Q. (2018) "Taming Labor: Workers’ Struggles, Workplace Unionism and Collective Bargaining on a Chinese Waterfront" ILR Review 71(5): 1053-1077.
• Shah, A. and Lerche, J. (2021) "Black Lives Matter, Capital and Ideology: Spiralling out from India" British Journal of Sociology, 72 (1). pp. 93-105.
• Shah, A., and Lerche J. (2020) "Migration and the Invisible Economies of Care: Production, Social Reproduction and Seasonal Migrant Labour in India" Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45: 719– 734.
• Stevano, S. (2021) "The Workplace at the Bottom of Global Supply Chains as a Site of Reproduction of Colonial Relations: Reflections on the Cashew-Processing Industry in Mozambique" Gender, Work and Organization.
• Stevano, S. (2022) "Classes of Working Women in Mozambique: An Integrated Framework to Understand Working Lives" Review of International Political Economy, 29 (6). pp. 1847-1869.
• Stevano, S., Mezzadri, A., Lombardozzi, L. and Bargawi, H. (2021) "Hidden Abodes in Plain Sight: The Social Reproduction of Households and Labour in the COVID-19 pandemic" Feminist Economics, 27 (1/2). pp. 271-287.
• Tilley, L. (2020) "A Strange Industrial Order” Indonesia’s Racialized Plantation Ecologies and Anticolonial Estate Worker Rebellions" History of the Present 10(1): 67-83. 
• Tilley, L. (2020). "'The impulse is cartographic': Counter‐Mapping Indonesia’s Resource Frontiers in the Context of Coloniality". Antipode, 52(5), 1434-1454.

• Alessandra Mezzadri (2022): Contribution to teaching in the Global Labour University module "Subordination and discrimination in GSCs: recognising diversity and building unity"
• Alessandra Mezzadri: Contribution to UNU-WIDER ‘Transforming informal work and livelihoods’ project. Output: Mezzadri, A. and Banerjee, K. (2021) "The afterlife of industrial work: Urban-to-rural labour transitions from the factory to the informal economy" Helsinki: UNU-WIDER Working Paper 2021/158
• Carlos Oya leads the evaluation of the ILO Programme Advancing Decent Work and Inclusive Industrialization in Ethiopia 2019-23, with a particular focus on the Better Work component.
• Christopher Cramer (2022) teaching on alternative perspectives on development economics, African Programme on Rethinking Development Economics (APORDE) residential school, South Africa (chair of scientific committee).
• Jens Lerche: contribution to ILO Word in Freedom Programme. Output: Bosc, I., Lerche, J., Shah, A., Fajerman, M. and Wadhawan, N. (2022) "Understanding patterns of structural discrimination of migrant and other workers in some countries of South and West Asia" Geneva: ILO. 
• Satoshi Miyamura (2021): invited participation to the global platform "How to live together? Circulations, Practices and Spaces in Indian contexts"

• Bringing Capital Back In: Labour Informalisation and Resistance in Contemporary Vietnam (Joseph Buckley, 2020)
• Bringing Operaismo to Gurgaon: a study of labour composition and resistance practices in the Indian Auto Industry (Lorenza Monaco, 2015) 
• Changing Dynamics of Tobacco Production and Exchange in South India: Towards a Socio-Ecological Analysis (Nithya Natarajan, 2019)
• Contemporary Land Rush, And Dynamics Of Agrarian Change In Senegal (2006-2017) (Rama Salla Dieng, 2019)
• Industrial Workers in the Garment Industry, House-Workers in the Family: Women's Productive and Reproductive Labour in İzmir, Turkey (Ayse Arslan, 2018) 
• Stalled Transformations? First-Order Effects of Industrialization on Land and Labour in Selected Areas, India and Indonesia (Karishma Boroowa, 2021)
• Trade union responses to economic liberalisation in Ghana (Prince Asafu-Adjaye, 2021)