Srabani Maitra

An Ethnodrama on Work-Related Learning in Precarious Jobs Racialization and Resistance

This article is based on a research project on the lived experiences of precarious workers in Toronto, Canada. Using interviews with women in part-time, contract, and temporary jobs in three sectors (telemarketing, retail, and garment), the project explores the ways in which racial hierarchies structure jobs as well as forms of resistance that women exercise at work. The authors find that racialized processes stereotype workers and their skill sets, organize their work, determine their access to and exclusion from certain types of jobs, and impose cultural rules that classify and essentialize them in terms of race, language, and ethnicity. In this article, the authors use ethnodrama to represent their findings from this research project. Ethnodrama is a form that is well suited for this work because it allows us to bring the data to life through an embodied performance.

Points of entry: South Asian immigrant women's entry into enclave entrepreneurship in Toronto

Based on interviews with 25 highly educated South Asian immigrant women working as home-based entrepreneurs within ethnic enclaves in Toronto, this article demonstrates how the women are engaged in reconfiguring gendered relations and community ties in response to the domination and marginalisation they often experience at home and in the Canadian labour market.

The making of the ‘precarious’: examining Indian immigrant IT workers in Canada and their transnational networks with body shops in India

Since the 1990s, temporary staffing agencies have been playing a key role in managing and supplying a ready pool of skilled workers to the global IT market. Yet, such agencies often regulate their workforce to maintain flexible, low-cost and accommodating workers. Due to continuing racial and gendered barriers, many immigrant Indian IT professionals living in Canada are increasingly depending on many such India-based staffing agencies (body shops) to get into IT employment globally. Such associations I argue are turning the workers into a self-regulated and precarious workforce subjected to severe regulations and flexible work patterns of the agencies.

Tapping into the ‘standing-reserve’: a comparative analysis of workers’ training programmes in Kolkata and Toronto

This paper examines employment-related training programmes offered by state funded agencies and multinational corporations in Toronto (Canada) and Kolkata (India). In recent years both cities have witnessed a rise in the service sector industries aligned with global regimes of flexible work and the consequent reinvention of a worker subject that is no longer disciplined according to the needs of industrial production. A worker must now be self-regulated, competitive, flexible, with an ability to convey an urbane, English-speaking deportment within the workplace. Training of employees, especially soft skill training becomes crucial in this connection as a form of technology for achieving this end. Based on Martin Heidegger’s conceptualisation of ‘standing-reserve’, we suggest that what training programmes do in the context of neoliberal capitalist production is the creation of an essential quality of human-ness that has to be harnessed, its potentialities tapped and amplified through training. We further suggest that such programmes often remain heavily influenced by race/class/gender hierarchies as well as stereotypical assumptions of desirable/undesirable bodies, forms of socialisation and modes of habitation that often are naturalised in the course of training.

Crafting ‘enterprising’ workers through career training programs among Canada’s South Asian professional immigrants

Abstract In the current post-Fordist, neoliberal Canadian state, the concept of the ‘enterprising self’ has come to define worker-subjectivity and ability to access the labour market. The discourse of entrepreneurialism promotes individual initiatives and resources as the most useful qualities necessary to be successful in the neoliberal labour market. This paper, based on two qualitative research projects examines the mechanism through which enterprising conduct is instilled within immigrants in Canada. In particular, the focus is on South Asian immigrants to take up questions of how racialised immigrants fit into the enterprise culture. This is an area that has remained understudied, despite the fact that immigrants of colour in Canada are consistently pushed towards re-training and re-skilling because of their higher rates of un/under employment in Canada. Informed by the theories of governmentality, the paper highlights two findings; first, it demonstrates how work-related training programs offered by the settlement agencies in Canada advocate the importance of being ‘enterprising’ by harping on discourses of self-sufficiency and personal endeavour to become productive workers; second, the programs implicitly correct or redress immigrants of colour to conform to the hegemonic Eurocentric codes underlying normative citizenship. In foregrounding the experiences of South Asian immigrants, this paper thus explores how the process of neoliberal subject making, particularly in the first world countries, has a racial and cultural undertone. Racism continues to circulate powerfully in the neoliberal era, reordering existing modes of inclusion and exclusion which, having been relegated to the realm of private choice becomes difficult to pinpoint.

Revisioning curriculum in the age of transnational mobility: Towards a transnational and transcultural framework

ABSTRACT Under the new mobilities paradigm, migration is conceptualized as circulatory and transnational, moving us beyond the framework of methodological nationalism. Transnational mobility has called into question dominant notions of migrant acculturation or assimilation. Migrants no longer feel obligated to remain tied to or locatable in a “given”, unitary culture. Rather, they are becoming embedded within a shifting field of increasingly transcultural identities. While migrants are becoming more transnational and adopting fluid, transcultural identities, there is a lack of focus and engagement with transnationalism as well as transculturalism in the official Canadian public school curricula. As scholars contend, Canadian school curricula are still based on Eurocentric, homogenizing, nationalistic discourses that tend to normalize values, norms, and behaviours that are perceived as “different” from the dominant norm. In response to the limitations of Canadian official curricula, as noted by various scholars who have examined curriculum documents, this essay proposes a revision of Canadian curricula in the context of transnational mobility with the aim of developing an approach that would integrate transnational and transcultural perspectives into the existing system. The article thus proposes a transnational and transcultural framework as an alternative to build a more ethical and inclusive school curriculum in Canada.