ABSTRACT This article draws on digital ethnographic fieldwork to examine how the pandemic‐induced shift to remote work prompted workers at a London tech start‐up to engage in ethical reflections on their new work–life arrangements. Workers imagined becoming a more “balanced” worker—autonomous but connected, productive but not burnt out, balanced but still committed—capable of investing their time and energy into both their professional and personal lives. Yet as time passed, aspirations to cultivate a balanced self clashed with emerging ambiguities about what counts as “real work” and “procrastination” when working from home. As everyday rhythms were reconfigured, the absence of office‐based social cues revealed the collective, relational maintenance work that underpins temporal order, workplace presence, and a sense of balance for workers. By tracing workers' struggles and efforts to cultivate balance, this article contributes to debates on the social dynamics and moral contradictions of remote work in a post‐pandemic context.

ABSTRACTThis article is part of the special issue “Laboring from Ex‐Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work”, Anthropology of Work Review 46(1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. In this article, we take the example of endometriosis activism to explore the interrelationship between chronic illness, activism, and work. Endometriosis is a life‐limiting condition affecting at least one in ten girls and women, and unmeasured numbers of transgender and gender‐diverse people. While most studies emphasize the disease's negative effects on people's paid work, we extend the concept of work to include the unpaid labor of activism. Moreover, building on critical analyses of care work and activism, we also illuminate the complex link between endometriosis and activism, highlighting both activism's empowering potential and its connection to paid employment. The framing of activism as work also reveals the condition's susceptibility to capitalist performance pressures which may negatively impact health and well‐being, highlighting the broader interplay between activism, political structures, and labor. This article thus makes two key contributions: first, it theorizes activism as an invisible and unpaid form of labor that plays a vital role in shaping the lived experiences, narratives, and public understanding of endometriosis and chronic illness more broadly. Second, it deepens our understanding of the multifaceted implications of endometriosis in relation to labor—both paid and unpaid—thereby situating the condition within broader sociopolitical and economic structures.

The authors have nothing to report.

Abstract Few domestic workers on the semiautonomous Tanzanian archipelago of Zanzibar are registered union members, and most domestic workers neither receive nor demand their legal right to a formal contract. Relying on my yearlong engagement between 2017 and 2018 with a women's Islamic studies group and a life history interview with a domestic worker, this essay explores domestic workers' reliance on alternative protective mechanisms from unionization and formalization. The domestic workers I engaged with cultivated relationships with God, negotiated dignity, received affirmation of their spiritual equality, and developed spiritual kinship connections in faith‐based spaces. They also sought to ensure their physical and social well‐being through kin‐based connections and recruitment mechanisms. Kin‐based connections that were spiritual or that connected domestic workers to employers were more protective than kinship relations cultivated in the context of work. Furthermore, domestic workers transformed routine work tasks into opportunities to practice devotion, which reflects Swahili/Islamic understandings of personhood as going beyond the category of worker. Religious spaces and spiritual kinship offer protection to domestic workers through the forms of reciprocity they enable and are thus often a more viable framework than unionization and formalization for overcoming the compounding effects of economic crisis and social inequality on domestic workers' lives.

Abstract Kuppi in Sinhala and Tamil refers to a small oil lamp, a vial. On university campuses in Sri Lanka, kuppi is the figurative term for a student‐led informal study group led by a “smarter” or senior student. Informed by the complexities of university life, kuppi signifies a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall. It parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies. Drawing upon this conceit, a group of academics and activists, found the Kuppi Collective in 2020, as an inquiry of the location of the university, academia, the intellectual and of their imbrication in the state and the global, in all its complexity.In “Conversations in a Time of Crisis,” five of the collective’s members enter into a conversation reflecting on its actions, expectations, and the political, remarking on what the future may hold. The conversation takes on an ever more insistent urgency as Sri Lanka catapults into an economic and political debacle, slowly shutting down, even as we speak. Participants in the conversation are Hasini Lecamwasam (HL), Sivamohan Sumathy (SS), Shamala Kumar (SK), Ahilan Kadirgamar (AK), and Nicola Perera (NP).

Abstract Ethnographic fieldwork in Bihar, India, reveals paradoxes at the core of contemporary agriculture. Rural people view growing their own food as a crucial bulwark against the vicissitudes of the market but prioritize off‐farm employment to meet rising household expenses. Landowners who cultivate crops often refer to themselves as unemployed while complaining about a lack of laborers to work the land. They do not always refer to themselves as farmers, while many people who do not call themselves farmers nevertheless perform farm work and rely on agriculture as a livelihood. These paradoxes point to the fuzziness and incoherence surrounding the term “farmer” as both an identity and analytical concept. Ideologies of agricultural labor are shaped by different subject positions and social categories, such as caste, gender, and age. The fractured, fluid, and contingent nature of agriculture, in which people move between different locations and identities, provides the grounds for problematizing scholarly categories of agricultural labor—categories like farmer, landlord, peasant, sharecropper, and laborer. The on‐the‐ground realities of agriculture necessitate reframing the conceptual language to attend to the specificity and materiality of labor in particular sites and moments while also foregrounding the ambivalence, vulnerability, and incompleteness that inheres in agricultural labor.