Industrial Work and Its Future

Contemporary debates on the 'future of work' remain heavily skewed towards the gig economy, platform labour, and AI-driven displacement. While this scholarship has critically uncovered new hidden abodes of production, revealing fresh mechanisms of labour extraction, individualised risk, and intensified surplus value, it has largely treated questions of 'industrial work',' the 'factory,' and the 'sweatshop' as settled terrain, no longer requiring sustained theoretical or empirical attention. This session seeks to challenge that closure by centering 'industrial work' within ongoing debates on the future of work. Given that a substantial share of the Global South's workforce remains embedded in informal modes of employment facilitating global manufacturing supply chains, it becomes essential to ask how industrial labour, the factory, and the sweatshop have themselves transformed under contemporary capitalism.

We invite ethnographic and theoretical contributions that explore the shifting meanings of the 'factory' today; the meaning-making practices through which industrial workers narrate and navigate their labour; the dialectics of precarity and opportunity that structure industrial life; and the temporal and spatial matrices that (dis)organise industrial work in the present moment.