Deserving Bodies, Contested Injuries: Moral Economies of Worker Health

Datum
15. April 2026 

CFP for Oral Pre­sen­ta­tion Ses­sion at the Amer­i­can Anthro­po­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion Annu­al Meeting

Cfp for Pan­el „Deserv­ing Bod­ies, Con­test­ed Injuries: Moral Economies of Work­er Health”
Orga­niz­ers: Zeynel Gül (Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois, Chica­go) and Gabriela Morales (Scripps College)
Dis­cus­sant: Alex Nad­ing (Cor­nell University)
Nov 18–22, 2026
St. Louis, MO

Deal­dine April 15, 2026

This pan­el cen­ters the moral economies that emerge around sick­ness, injury, and tox­i­c­ex­po­sure stem­ming from work and the work­place. We seek papers that unpack how workers,medical providers, legal experts, occu­pa­tion­al safe­ty experts, and employ­ers eval­u­ate bodilyharm—and its pre­ven­tion and compensation—in the work­place. What kinds of work and whatkinds of harm do these actors ren­der vis­i­ble or invis­i­ble? Giv­en that occu­pa­tion­al health is ahigh­ly state-cen­tered con­cept, what notions of fair­ness, val­ue, and accept­able risk do peo­ple­with occu­pa­tion­al injuries mobi­lize with­in and beyond reg­u­la­to­ry discourses?Occupational health offers a unique van­tage point for observ­ing how the „wor­thi­ness” of lives isd­if­fer­en­tial­ly dis­trib­uted. Fur­ther, the slow vio­lence of chron­ic dis­ease and dis­abil­i­ty due to workex­tends biopol­i­tics beyond the sim­ple bina­ries of liv­ing or dying (Liv­ingston 2005; Puar 2017). Yet, like oth­er bio­med­ical fields (Street 2014), occu­pa­tion­al health is also less sta­ble and uni­fiedthan it might first appear; it requires con­tin­u­al coor­di­na­tion and sta­bi­liza­tion of what con­sti­tuteswork, the work­place, and work­place harm. The mul­ti­plic­i­ty of actors involved in such­co­or­di­na­tion puts pres­sure on per­spec­tives that view the moral econ­o­my as a mono­lithic­concept emerg­ing sole­ly as a response to aggres­sive mar­ket economies (see also Fassin 2015on this point). We ask: what inter­me­di­ary components—such as health sys­tems, families,courts, and bureaucracies—are engaged in the pro­duc­tion and cir­cu­la­tion of morals and val­ue­saround the injured worker’s body? How do the dynam­ic inter­ac­tions between these com­po­nents­gen­er­ate new cat­e­gories, iden­ti­ties, and val­ues while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly dis­pers­ing the knowl­edge­and vis­i­bil­i­ty of harm? Even fur­ther, for work­ers and providers alike, insti­tu­tion­al assess­mentsand com­pen­sa­tion for harm can be unsatisfactory—and lead to alter­na­tive ways of relat­ing toin­jury and expo­sure. How, we ask, might we also reimag­ine what con­sti­tutes health in rela­tion towork (or work in rela­tion to health), with­in and beyond cap­i­tal­ist systems?

Please send a title and an abstract for your paper (of no more than 300 words) togmorales@scrippscollege.edu and zgul2@uic.edu by April 15, 2026