Wiley-Online-Library: Anthropology of Work Review: Table of Contents

Familiar Interfaces: Norms of Domesticity and Immigrant Latina Workers on Care Work Platforms

Magally Miranda — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article examines the experiences of immigrant Latina domestic workers on care work platforms, arguing that these technologies extend historical norms of domesticity into the digital era through algorithmic bias, visibility regimes, and quantification. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with fifteen workers in Los Angeles alongside platform analysis, it introduces the framework of familiar interfaces to show how user interfaces and the data that shape them rely on historically sedimented racialized and gendered scripts of domesticity. Using co-research methods, the article centers workers' stories and situated knowledge to illuminate how they navigate, perform, and contest opaque algorithmic systems. By situating platform-mediated care work within longer histories of racialized, gendered, and migratory domestic labor, this study contributes to scholarship on labor and technology while reorienting analyses of the so-called gig economy away from androcentric, public-facing sectors like ride-hailing and delivery, and toward the historically feminized, racialized, and immigrant labor of domestic work.

Keeping Company: Exploring the Positive Dimensions of Emotional Labor in China's Pei Liao Industry

Manchun Du, Ryan G. Hornbeck — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article examines positive dimensions of emotional labor through ethnographic fieldwork on paid online companionship in China's pei liao industry. We argue that dominant concepts in emotional labor research outside anthropology have limited the extent to which emotional labor's brighter possibilities can be recognized—specifically, by framing it as inherently self-deceptive, overlooking workers' interactional skill in shaping encounters, and relying on static models of the self. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews with pei liao workers, we address these limitations by introducing “identity positioning” as both an analytic concept and an observed interactional strategy. Identity positioning refers to the deliberate selection and foregrounding of role-, group-, and trait-based identities that are already meaningful to workers, rather than the suppression or reworking of inner feelings, as a means of building rapport with clients. We then show that identity positioning's positive outcomes may arise through two pathways: it can enable workers to engage and develop identities that are acknowledged yet underdeveloped in their repertoire, and to elaborate already salient identities into distinct variants through interactions with different clients.

Navigating Choice: School Buses as Racializing Infrastructure in Post‐Katrina New Orleans

Christien Philmarc Tompkins — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article is part of the special issue, Racialization and The Gig Economy, Anthropology of Work Review 47 (1), June 2026, edited by Shreya Subramani and Christien Tompkins. This article explores the expansion of school busing systems in the aftermath of New Orleans' unprecedented conversion of all public schools to privately managed charter schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The charter system strikingly moved from neighborhood schools to schools of choice, forcing the primarily black and low-income student body to commute twice as long to school across an increasingly fractured racial landscape. The article argues that the school bus and the students themselves have become racializing infrastructures and that the mobility labor of these students is both reflective of larger transformations in gig economies and, in its spatial and racial dimensions, has turned their access to schooling into a form of gig work. Like gig workers, students are increasingly forced to circulate between urban core and periphery in service of both their own entrepreneurial and economic ambitions but also in service of larger ideological projects of choice and a market model of society—movements with hidden social and economic costs and unjust burdens.

Notes From the Editorial Collective

Letizia Bonanno, Jasmine Folz, Rachel Smith — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Anthropology of Work Review, Volume 47, Issue 1, July 2026.

Finding One's Footing: Hidden Abodes of Production in the Global Running Economy

Hannah Borenstein — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article is part of the special issue ‘Racialization and The Gig Economy’ (AWR July 2026; 47(1)) edited by Shreya Subramani and Christien Tompkins. This article examines how Ethiopian women distance runners labor within—and reveal the contradictions of—the global running economy. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in Ethiopia, Europe, and the United States, I analyze how athletes navigate two intertwined value circuits: the mass consumer markets of the Global North, where running shoes become lucrative lifestyle commodities, and the elite competitive circuit, where a small number of East African athletes generate the spectacular performances that confer value on those commodities. Through attention to everyday struggles over access to “super shoes,” contract negotiations, prize structures, and the social life of footwear, I show how Ethiopian athletes' labor forms a hidden abode of production that is indispensable yet structurally obscured. Racialized discourses of “marketability,” gendered hierarchies of visibility, and the fetishization of African “natural ability” shape how value is extracted from athletes while limiting their ability to realize it as income, mobility, or security. By centering women's critiques, misapprehensions, and aspirations, the article demonstrates how gig-like athletic labor in the transnational running economy is simultaneously empowering and precarious, illuminating broader dynamics of racial capitalism, technological change, and global inequality.

Why Work? Doing the Anthropology of Work

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Anthropology of Work Review, Volume 47, Issue 1, July 2026.

Material Gworls: Consumption and Cosmopolitanism From Jamaica to Japan

Roxanne Kimberly Dobson — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article is part of the special issue “Racialization and the gig economy”, Anthropology of Work Review 47(1), June 2026, edited by Shreya Subramani and Christien Tompkins. Amidst the economic precarity exacerbated by neoliberal policies of the 20th century, Jamaican women look beyond the island's shores to find financial stability. Beyond this, these women embrace the move to indulge in a creative process of self-growth and development. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with Black Jamaican women employed as English-language instructors in Japan, this article focuses on the mechanisms that set the stage for South-East migratory circuits from the Caribbean to Asia. In this practice of transcontinental “gig work,” Black Jamaican women navigate racialized and gendered regimes of value to access markets for their linguistic expertise as native speakers of English. Intervening in scholarship on seasonal migrant labor and neoliberal precarity, I discuss the ways that migration functions as an option for economic stability in a landscape of scarce employment. To this end, I incorporate Bianca Williams' study of Black American women who travel to find happiness in Jamaica and Jonathan Rosa's work on raciolinguistics to address the ways Jamaican women experience and observe language, race, and ethnic categorization in Japan. From this discussion, Japan emerges as a site of discovery, encounter, and struggle in contemporary gig economies. Here, women question their larger life goals, stake claims to a more fulfilling work-life experience, and negotiate different versions of themselves.

Issue Information

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Anthropology of Work Review, Volume 47, Issue 1, July 2026.

Futures of Transit Work: Contesting Devaluation and Neoliberal Automation in Bus Transit

Hunter Akridge, Sarah E. Fox — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

ABSTRACT

Being a bus operator has long meant access to middle class wages, quality benefits, and union membership, forms of security increasingly rare amid growing precarity. But transit is in trouble. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and decades of disinvestment, bus operators face mounting time pressure, frequent violence, and eroding job security. They are framed as inefficient, a narrative used to justify weakening their labor protections and degrading dignity on the job. We highlight the on-the-ground effects of this racialized devaluation through first-hand accounts from bus operators across the U.S. and Canada. Their embodied critique of the current crisis makes visible the harms of neoliberal transformations, including emerging technological change. A driverless future is being advanced, one that would further degrade bus operators' dignity and devalue their labor. We introduce the concept of neoliberal automation to describe this trajectory and describe how it is being contested. Transit workers are rejecting automation framed by austerity and displacement, offering instead visions of a labor future centered on dignity, safety, and democratic control over technological change.