Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
The early 2020s brought a torrent of disruptions – COVID-19, war-amplified inflation and migration blockages – that reshaped global labour in uneven and deeply unequal ways. Across the Global North and South, vulnerable workers faced deteriorating conditions, fractured livelihoods and growing distrust as chronic uncertainty was compounded by socio-economic and political shocks.
Moving beyond policy-driven models focused on human and social capital, this edited collection offers a variety of novel biographical and relational approaches to studying resilience that all centre on workers’ lived experiences, histories and networks. Drawing on rich fieldwork across multiple countries, the authors show how past crises, care obligations and collective ties both enable resilience and generate new burdens.
Bridging biographical research methods, social reproduction theory and development studies, this book shows that resilience is a relational process shaped by inequality, gender, migration and labour struggle.
Mihai Varga is Research Associate and Lecturer in Sociology at the Institute for East-European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin.
Mateusz Karolak is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Wrocław.
Adam Mrozowicki is Head of the Department of the Sociology of Work and Economic Sociology at the Institute of Sociology, University of Wrocław.
1. Workers, Biographies and the Polycrisis: Introduction (Mihai Varga, Mateusz Karolak, Adam Mrozowicki)
2. Worker Biographies and Recurrent Crises in the EU Periphery (Mihai Varga and Diana Percă)
3. Essential Workers and Biographical Resources in Germany (Christian Fröhlich)
4. Debts, Work, and Autonomy of Women Returnees to Colombia (Sofia Margarita Vinasco-Molina and Yenny Carolina Ramírez Suárez)
5. Waiting and Hope among Precarious Migrant Workers in Istanbul (Soner Barthoma and Susan Beth Rottmann)
6. Care between Nationhood and Capitalism: Precarious Female Teachers in Croatia’s Minoritised Education (Emina Bužinkić and Nina Čolović)
7. Navigating the Storm: Coping Strategies of Migrant and Non-Migrant Logistics Workers in Poland (Mateusz Karolak, Könül Jafarova, and Adam Mrozowicki)
8. Trade Union Activism as a Biographical Resource: Unionised Health Care Workers Facing COVID-19 in Upstate New York (Adam Mrozowicki and Jacek Burski)
9. Vale do Ribeira, Serra da Bocaina, and the Amazon: Community Resilience in Brazil (Marina Fontolan, Aline Hasegawa, Liliana Acero, Carla Águas, José Maria Trajano, and Leda Gitahy)
10. Global Workers and Entangled Crises: Conclusions (Mateusz Karolak, Adam Mrozowicki, Mihai Varga)