Conceptualising Globalised Workplaces and Fragmentation of Youth Subjectivities and Experiences in Them – Theorising from the Global South Perspectives

This conceptual and theoretical paper is a part of the broader anti-colonial comparative research project (under review) that aims to to investigate how young people in the Global South and peripheries of the Global North are formed as workers, and therefore as subjects that are produced, valorised, and revalorised as part of the labour force, in the process of globalisation. This is to be achieved through analysis of media and national and international policy discourses that underpin the global movements of capital and labour and shape the ways different young people are valued or devalued as part of the labour force. Secondly, the second aim is to investigate experiences, subjectivities, and imaginaries of the young people themselves, in particular the youth working in the interconnected globalised workspaces. These are the workplaces created by (i) practices of offshoring the production of goods and services; (ii) through franchising and (iii) because of the development of global digital platforms and media. The key question asked here is to what extent global forces, interconnections, and imaginaries inherent in the expansion and design of globalised workspaces create global workers as uniformed subjects, similar regardless of locality and to what extent and how are youth subjectivities and processes of subjectification as workers are localised in the local network of norms, traditions, and social structures. The paper firstly conceptualises the differences between globalised workspaces in Global South and their local traditional counterparts that is useful conceptual differentiation for studies of youth and work in the global context. Lastly, the paper explores the theoretical contributions from the Global South especially theory of fragmentation by the Mexican athropoligist Gonzalo Saravi as the one of the ways how the research about young people in the world of work can be explored.