300465 Bodies in Resistance: Contesting Racialised, Gendered, Ableist, Ecological and Precarious Knowledge in Global Labour Divisions (S) (SoSe 2026)

The physical aspect of social conflicts and labour struggles is often overlooked. Even though social actors in conflicts have bodies, concerns and grievances related to live and knowledge production remain invisible or are abstracted from political economic discourses. It is the labouring body that enables social reproduction in various forms; it is the labouring body that creates commodities, use value, and the basis of capital accumulation. The labouring body, as part of nature and in metabolic interaction with it, performs work. It is also the body that reads, writes, remembers and creates categories, as well as making distinctions. Human beings potentially exercise (epistemic) violence on "others" through their bodies.
Global labour divisions run along spatially uneven corporalities, which are often exploited to justify exploitation, dispossession and expulsion.
In this seminar, we are adopting and developing a materialist vantage point on body politics and labour division, focusing on various social and labour struggles in which bodily issues are at stake.