Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Copenhagen Business School, and PRODIG.

CHAIRPERSON

Asst Prof Sahana Ghosh, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

This roundtable discussion brings together Andrew Herod, Peter Lund-Thomsen and Rebecca Prentice in conversation with the author of Garments without Guilt?: Global Labour Justice and Ethical Codes in Sri Lankan Apparels, Kanchana N. Ruwanpura. They review her book to analyse how worker initiatives and collective struggles were also pivotal in shaping the industry’s presentation as an ethical producer – and how the government also responded accordingly. Her book through careful analysis shows how, through their struggles and initiatives, workers have shaped how production is organized not just in a single factory or community but across an entire industry. Rather than being left out of the story of the industry’s development, as has been par for the course in many descriptions of the ‘Sri Lankan miracle’, in her account, workers are placed centre stage.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Andrew Herod is Distinguished Research Professor of Geography and Adjunct Professor of International Affairs and of Anthropology at the University of Georgia. He writes frequently on the topic of labor and globalization. He is the author of such books as Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism, Geographies of Globalization, Scale, and Labor. He has edited or co-edited several books, including Handbook of Employment and Society: Working Space, The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global Economy, and Organizing the Landscape: Geographical Perspectives on Labor Unionism. He is also an elected official, having served as a member of the Unified Government of Athens-Clarke County, Georgia, since 2007. He holds a PhD in geography from Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

Peter Lund Thomsen is Professor of Business Studies at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He specializes in the broad field of corporate social responsibility and sustainability in the global South (with a regional focus on South Asia). In particular, his work is interested in how the organization of transnational industries and local industrial clusters affect the economic, social, and environmental upgrading/downgrading of firms, workers, and environment. His work has appeared in journals in seeveral peer reviewed journals and he is the author of the book Rethinking CSR in Global Value Chains in the Age of COVID-19 (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022).

Rebecca Prentice is Reader in Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex. She holds a BA in Anthropology from Cornell University, an MA in the Anthropology of Development and Social Transformation from the University of Sussex, and a DPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Sussex. In 2010 she held an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at Goldsmiths, University of London. Rebecca’s book, Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad, won the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize. Her co-edited book (with Geert De Neve) is Unmaking the Global Sweatshop: Health and Safety of the World’s Garment Workers (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Kanchana N. Ruwanpura is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Honorary Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Alongside her academic positions, she is also an editor of the journals Gender, Place and Culture and Geoforum, which she has held since circa 2015. Her book Garments without Guilt? Was written during her tenure as a France-ILO Chair Fellow (IAS-Nantes, France), Humboldt Fellow (University of Göttingen, Germany) and Visiting Senior Research Fellow (National University of Singapore). She has worked on themes related to conflict, post-disaster politics, post-war development, labour and environment from a feminist perspective. This research has appeared in research monographs, books, edited volumes and journal articles, in which she is either the sole author or a co-author.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.