Published in Volume 56, Issue 3 of Antipode in May 2024, David Jordhus-Lier and Neil Coe’s open access article “The Roles and Intersections of Constrained Labour Agency” responds to a recent intervention by Kendra Strauss in Progress in Human Geography, challenging the sub-discipline of labour geography to reflect on who counts as a worker and what counts as work.

By combining theories of roles and intersectionality, David and Neil’s article poses a related question: as whom do workers act? Theoretically, a critical realist approach to labour agency forms the basis for an intersectional reading of the active subject. To illustrate their argument, David and Neil juxtapose the accounts of three people who speak for groups of workers or are asked to justify the actions of collective actors like unions or social movements. By showing how these actors improvise their own role incumbency while actively negotiating social identities, the article problematises the epistemology of constrained labour agency while responding to Strauss’ call for a rethinking of the ontologies of work.

You can read more about David and Neil’s Antipode article—and watch David talking about it and the research it’s engaging with and contributing to—below. For more on David and Neil and their seminal work in labour geography, see https://www.sv.uio.no/iss/english/people/aca/davidcl/ and https://www.sydney.edu.au/science/about/our-people/academic-staff/neil-coe.html

Can we learn how labour shapes capitalism by listening to workers? Can we understand the agency of collective actors by speaking to its formal or informal representatives? We believe the answer both questions is yes, and use this article to offer advice to labour geographers studying the collective agency of labour through qualitative case studies. More specifically, we introduce ways to employ the concepts of intersectionality and roles in case studies of constrained labour agency. Through conversations with activists in the rank-and-file or on the outskirts of formal worker politics, we illustrate how individuals navigate class, gender, and racial identities in their activism. We also show how the lives of individuals relate to the agency of collectives, both as experienced in everyday politics and as represented in academic text.