Labour geography II: Being, knowledge and agency

Abstract

This report builds on an examination of different approaches to labour precarity and precarious employment to argue for the need for labour geographers to examine the foundations of our approaches to agency. The debate about agency has become the terrain on which many labour geographers meet, but the dominant epistemology of agency has an (implicit or explicit) grounding in debates about labour’s spatial fix. This grounding rests on assumptions about the activities and sites that ‘count’ in analyses of labour, with implications for theory-building and the politics of knowledge production in labour geography.