Labour geography I: Labour agency, informal work, global south perspectives and the ontology of futures

Abstract

This review builds on Strauss’s (2020) discussion of how labour geographers conceptualise worker agency ontologically and epistemologically. Research on labour agency has been dominated by a narrow and limited lens based on a materialist ontology of capitalistic production which tends to depict labour agency as a ‘spatial fix’. Considering this critique, I review three themes of research on labour agency that push the boundaries of such dominant conceptualisations: understanding labour agency in informal work and by workers on the fringes of formalised economic spaces; from perspectives in the Global South; and via an ontology of the future.