ABSTRACTThis paper analyzes the content of India's digital self‐help gurus (SHGs), who are popular online figures in India, and engages a varied online audience across multiple social media platforms. We examine the role that the digital SHGs play to mediate cultural transformation following economic restructuring of the Indian economy that began in the 1990s and rapidly transformed the socioeconomic landscape. There was a shift to contractual and uncertain employment, and a simultaneous valorization of entrepreneurial citizenship. We propose that the digital SHGs facilitate this transformation by undertaking the work of mourning and the work of dreaming. Through their advice and content, they enable a letting go of the values historically attached with higher education and stable employment and help cultivate new attitudes toward skill accumulation, self‐audit, and responsibilization—core tenets of enterprise culture—to posit entrepreneurial citizenship as a desirable goal. However, entrepreneurial citizenship can be exclusionary and offer unstable belonging. The digital SHGs assuage these fears and anxieties by normalizing failure and prescribing perseverance to cultivate the entrepreneurial self.

ABSTRACTThis article is part of the special issue “Laboring from Ex‐Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work” (AWR July 2025; 46(1)) edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. Neutrality, epitomized as Whiteness, confers privileges that hinge on being neurotypical, equating neutrality with both Whiteness and the perception of normalcy. For individuals who are both autistic and non‐White, navigating this construct often means enduring intersecting forms of oppression. This article examines these dynamics through the personal narratives of a Black neurotypical woman and an autistic Latina in the workplace. Drawing on Critical Racial Studies, Critical Autism Studies, Whiteness Studies, and ethnographic research, we highlight the urgent need for collaboration across these fields. To advance this effort, we introduce the term neuroaquilombar, representing a deliberate approach to cultivating collective spaces that affirm cultural identity for Black and non‐White populations while embracing neurological diversity as a natural aspect of humanity. Through collaborative autoethnography as escrevivências, we reflect on the challenges of conforming to capitalist productivity standards in a society structured for the success of the White, able‐bodied majority. By recounting our workplace experiences, we aim to deepen understanding, foster connections that humanize diverse experiences, and issue a call to action for advocates in both spheres. Additionally, we seek to showcase new forms of engagement that transcend the extractive practices often associated with anthropological research conducted by non‐disabled White scholars.

ABSTRACTThe transition to industrial regimes has produced new categories of people deemed “unfit” for labor. Even if these boundaries are more porous nowadays, contributions to this Special Issue reveal continuities in how people struggle for a place in domains of work that are ill‐shaped to accommodate their diverse bodyminds. Drawing on disability/chronicity cases from India, Germany, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil/Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States, authors in this issue study how people navigate and reshape the boundaries between labor, care, and recognition. Based on these insights, this introduction calls for scholarly engagement with visions of work as they emerge from what Faye Harrison calls ex‐centric sites, i.e., viewing the margins of normative labor regimes as analytical loci for knowledge creation. We consider work not only in the context of how capitalist and biomedical systems produce debilitation and moral distinction but also as a transformative sphere, irreducible to predominant categories of employment and productivity. Bridging between medical/disability anthropology, critical disability studies, and the anthropology of work, we call for an expansive understanding of work and theory‐building from neglected positionings within labor economies.

ABSTRACTThis article is part of the special issue “Laboring from Ex‐Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work”, Anthropology of Work Review 46(1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. In this article, we take the example of endometriosis activism to explore the interrelationship between chronic illness, activism, and work. Endometriosis is a life‐limiting condition affecting at least one in ten girls and women, and unmeasured numbers of transgender and gender‐diverse people. While most studies emphasize the disease's negative effects on people's paid work, we extend the concept of work to include the unpaid labor of activism. Moreover, building on critical analyses of care work and activism, we also illuminate the complex link between endometriosis and activism, highlighting both activism's empowering potential and its connection to paid employment. The framing of activism as work also reveals the condition's susceptibility to capitalist performance pressures which may negatively impact health and well‐being, highlighting the broader interplay between activism, political structures, and labor. This article thus makes two key contributions: first, it theorizes activism as an invisible and unpaid form of labor that plays a vital role in shaping the lived experiences, narratives, and public understanding of endometriosis and chronic illness more broadly. Second, it deepens our understanding of the multifaceted implications of endometriosis in relation to labor—both paid and unpaid—thereby situating the condition within broader sociopolitical and economic structures.

ABSTRACTThis article is part of the special issue “Laboring from Ex‐Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work” (title of SI; AWR July 2025; 46(1)) edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. This paper examines the experiences of work and unemployment among residents of an East London borough living with multiple long‐term health conditions. Through ethnographic research, we explore the psychopolitics of unemployment in an urban setting, focusing on the cyclical relationship between (un)employment and (ill‐)health. Our findings show the double bind participants often experience regarding work: while they desired employment and could only imagine a fulfilling life through work, they found it impossible to remain in most workplaces they had experienced, as these environments worsened their health conditions. This contradiction created a sense of existential stuckness among our study participants. Additionally, our analysis highlights the moral and bureaucratic challenges involved in managing unemployment. The benefit assessment process, combined with social isolation, often reinforced a chronic identity among long‐term unemployed participants, leading to a diminished sense of their own capabilities. By theorizing the seduction of labor in contemporary societies as a distinct form of psychopolitics inherent to neoliberal governance, we aim to highlight the troubling pressure governments place on individuals to work, even under conditions of long‐term illness.

ABSTRACTThis article is part of the special issue Laboring from Ex‐Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work, Anthropology of Work Review 46(1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. How do the tools and processes of disability assessment fragment, quantify, and measure bodies, body parts, and physical capacities? How do these medical and legal forms of compartmentalization translate physical capacity into a bioeconomically standardized ability to work, which I call “bodyworkability”? I explore these questions by focusing on coal miners' medical and labor experiences in the Soma Basin, Turkey. Bodyworkability describes the medico‐legal substitution of body parts—limbs, muscles, bones, organs, tissues, nerves—with quantified units of standardized ability to work. The concept illuminates the distinction between physical capacity and the ability to perform specific types of work, enhancing understandings of both labor power and disability. The article centers on two disability assessment tools: the Table of Percentages of Handicap [Özür Oranları Cetveli]—or Barema, as used by the Council of Europe—and Balthazard's Formula/Index, used for individuals with multiple disabling conditions. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the concept of bodyworkability emerges from the lived experiences of miners who are injured, maimed, or diagnosed with occupational illnesses due to work accidents, disasters, and toxicity, and who struggle to obtain official disability recognition.

ABSTRACTThis article is part of the special issue Laboring from Ex‐Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work, Anthropology of Work Review 46(1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. Over the last century, indigenous rurality in Mexico has undergone profound sociocultural and economic transformations. Peasant activities have declined, racialized forms of employment have emerged, and chronic conditions have skyrocketed, mirrored in the increasing numbers of people living with disabilities and for longer time spans. In such a context, disability and masculinity are simultaneously active shapers of spaces and embodiments of larger corpospatial transformations. Focusing on the work/disability experiences of three indigenous men of rural origin, we explore how being at work despite physical restrictions implies a rearrangement of how the body inhabits space and relates to working objects, including those which are culturally considered more “feminine.” By employing the concept “corpospatiality” we depict a set of dynamics that interlink gendered bodies, spaces, and objects in sociohistorically shaped fields. We understand these work/disability corpospatial (re)configurations as individual and collective responses to the conflict caused by shrinking environments due to disability. The intersection of disability and “work”—a mediating and transforming activity between humans and their surroundings—constitutes a privileged locus to think about changing masculinities.