Dialectical Anthropology - Call for Papers: African Workers and the Revival of Unionism in Anthropology

African Workers and the Revival of Unionism in Anthropology
Special Issue

Call for Papers | March 1, 2023

Dr Thomas McNamara
Department of Social Inquiry
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
La Trobe University, Australia

Professor Pnina Werbner
School of Social, Political and Global Studies
Keele University, United Kingdom

This special issue calls for ‘integrative’ ethnographies of class formation in Africa. It seeks comprehensive research that considers the historic relationships, ruptures and ‘long dispossessions’ through which individual and collective identities are formed. Rather than class as a single, static status signifier, we seek studies which embed class in dialogue with family, community and nation; as they explore its material, experiential and moral aspects. The special issue therefore calls for contributions that consider African workers and their unions through history, culture and identity-making. It aims to explore how workers’ local, vernacular identities and tangible solidarities create working classes and considers how classed identities shape social change.  

The special issue also seeks to consider the lessons for those outside the continent that can be found in the successes and struggles of African unions. Rather than looking for a homogenised working class, blind to the influence of race, gender and other aspects of personhood, African trade unions have inspired social change simultaneously connecting them to multiple communities, concepts of personhood, understandings of the good life and actively creating a way of being a worker that does not deny workers’ differing roots. This special issue seeks to comprehend these understandings and projects, and the challenges they have faced. Finally, understanding the norms, hierarchies and structures that unions are embedded in also creates space for considering other norms and hierarchies which affect unionism world-wide, but which are rendered natural by an association with Global North working classes. In calling for papers on African unions, we therefore call for increased understanding of the challenges and successes of unionism world-wide.