ISS21

Julius-Cezar Macarie, Marie-Skłodowska Curie Fellow, ISS21

12 December, 12-1pm

CACSSS Seminar Room, O'Rahilly Building

During this presentation, I will make three stops: the before, the now, and where to next. Firstly, I will explain how my past work with London’s manual labourers in the food chain supply contributes to the understanding of contemporary, 24/7, post-circadian capitalism. While here, also to illustrate how I will go about my current project, I focus on multi-modal methodological choices embedded in the Researcher’s Nightworkshop. I demonstrate that in order to expand possibilities for anthropological research, the ethnographer’s body needs to become an instrument for collecting bodily notes. Thus, I registered with my body the intensity of bodily movements while working the ‘graveyard’ shift to understand how precarity becomes embodied. In addition, I employed cyber-ethnography to quantify the physiological aspects of nightwork, and audio-visual methods to record and communicate findings to mixed audiences. This is the ethnographic canvas on which I weave in the conditions of night labour, migration and policies that lead to marginalisation of bio-automatons (half-human, half-machine nightworkers). Secondly, I will introduce where I am now in the research project with which I joined ISS21, that is, PRECNIGHTS. I will explain what PRECNIGHTS is and why I am so passionate about doing this project. I will also point out how everyone at UCC could do something to improve the situation of precarious migrant night workers. Thirdly, as a means to illustrate where I go next, I will elaborate on the research objectives of PRECNIGHTS and introduce tentative avenues and directions for my nightnographic project.