About this Research Topic
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to two important aspects of work: technology and workers’ health. In this Research Topic, we focus on the interrelations of health, care, and technology in either promoting or impeding inclusion at work. Contemporary technology-enabled workplaces are typically posited to facilitate the inclusion of traditionally marginalized groups, including women, the elderly, people from the Global South, caste-oppressed individuals, queer individuals, and (dis)abled workers. Historically, technological changes have been associated with the increasing participation of marginalized communities in wage labor. However, critical work and organizational scholars highlight the continuing dominance of masculine, Euro-US centered, heteronormative, casteist, and ableist bodies and lives, despite or through digital technological work infrastructures. The inclusion of marginalized bodies and lives in the racial-colonial-cisgendered-heteronormative transnational capitalist structures comes at the cost of immense physical and mental challenges for these workers in navigating the dominant norms at work.
Furthermore, the hyper-extractive logics of neoliberal capitalism leads to the production of ‘sick bodies’. Workers are held responsible for their marginalization and are encouraged to find individualized solutions for their systematic exclusion from or exhaustion due to wage labor. Through this neoliberal worldview, issues of health and care at wage work are instrumentalized in the service of productivity and efficiency. Coupled with the dominant gendered-ableist-casteist-racial logics, workers often hide their illness and vulnerabilities to survive in the extractive labor markets. Instead of addressing these systemic issues, employers encourage workers to care for themselves and remain healthy by taking advantage of work-from-home arrangements to balance competing demands, which take a toll on their health, and by forming digital communities to relieve stress and anxieties. However, digital technologies have made it even more difficult for workers to distance themselves from work, leading to increased physical and mental health problems.
We invite submissions that critically examine the concepts of "health" and "care" for workers in the context of an increasingly technology-driven workplace and lifestyle. Contributions from different disciplinary and theoretical frameworks and methodologies are welcome. Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:
• Theorizing technology, work, and worker’s health and care relations from an intersectional perspective
• Transnational division of work and its impact on workers’ health
•Technologies of quantification in governing workers’ health and the impact of structural inequalities
• Workers’ health insurance programs and their gendered, cis-heteronormative, racialized, ability-centered, casteist, and classist limits
• Health and care issues among migrant workers
• Histories of work, health, and technology relations
• Problematizing the instrumental approaches to health and “sickness” at work
• (Re)imagining healthy and caring workers and workplaces
• Decolonial, crip, queer, Dalit, and feminist alternatives to ableist regimes of work.
We accept a variety of article types; full details can be found on the Frontiers in Sociology website.
Furthermore, the hyper-extractive logics of neoliberal capitalism leads to the production of ‘sick bodies’. Workers are held responsible for their marginalization and are encouraged to find individualized solutions for their systematic exclusion from or exhaustion due to wage labor. Through this neoliberal worldview, issues of health and care at wage work are instrumentalized in the service of productivity and efficiency. Coupled with the dominant gendered-ableist-casteist-racial logics, workers often hide their illness and vulnerabilities to survive in the extractive labor markets. Instead of addressing these systemic issues, employers encourage workers to care for themselves and remain healthy by taking advantage of work-from-home arrangements to balance competing demands, which take a toll on their health, and by forming digital communities to relieve stress and anxieties. However, digital technologies have made it even more difficult for workers to distance themselves from work, leading to increased physical and mental health problems.
We invite submissions that critically examine the concepts of "health" and "care" for workers in the context of an increasingly technology-driven workplace and lifestyle. Contributions from different disciplinary and theoretical frameworks and methodologies are welcome. Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:
• Theorizing technology, work, and worker’s health and care relations from an intersectional perspective
• Transnational division of work and its impact on workers’ health
•Technologies of quantification in governing workers’ health and the impact of structural inequalities
• Workers’ health insurance programs and their gendered, cis-heteronormative, racialized, ability-centered, casteist, and classist limits
• Health and care issues among migrant workers
• Histories of work, health, and technology relations
• Problematizing the instrumental approaches to health and “sickness” at work
• (Re)imagining healthy and caring workers and workplaces
• Decolonial, crip, queer, Dalit, and feminist alternatives to ableist regimes of work.
We accept a variety of article types; full details can be found on the Frontiers in Sociology website.
Keywords: inclusion, inclusive, workplace, marginalization, gender, work, health, care, technology, neoliberal capitalism, digitalization
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
