ArcticLabourTime · Investing in the Arctic: the affective and temporal contradictions of work, mobility and inequality in northern peripheries

Investing in the Arctic: the affective and temporal contradictions of work, mobility and inequality in northern peripheries

Global economic uncertainty, the increasing precarity of work and widespread unemployment in Europe have ruptured linear paths to upward mobility and work security. The precaritization of labour and life has led some scholars to argue that there is no longer a utopian future to work towards. Other scholars maintain that anticipation is the dominant temporal mode of late capitalism through which present investments anticipate the profitability of the future. However, recent anthropological research demonstrates that multiple temporalities often co-exist in tension, in specific contexts. This scholarship further demonstrates that the affective and temporal dimensions of workers’ expectations for the future are crucial for understanding how and why people are invested in particular forms of work. ArcticLabourTime argues that places constructed as peripheral are crucial sites for understanding the temporal contradictions of the financialized global economy. Through ethnography and critical discourse analysis, this project examines the Finnish Arctic, that has been characterized by disinvestment and precarity, but which is currently a site of anticipatory investment, particularly in growing industries that exploit Lapland’s natural resources (e.g. tourism). Lapland’s sparse population, labour shortages, high rates of unemployment and seasonal work pose both challenges and opportunities for economic growth. One of the key means governments and employers aim to manage labour challenges has been to promote labour mobility. While critical sociolinguists have been attentive to how multilingual resources have become central to the global economy with the increased mobility of people and production, the temporal and affective dimensions of work and migration have not been adequately examined in sociolinguistics and Arctic studies. ArcticLabourTime importantly addresses these gaps in research. ArcticLabourTime asks: 1) How do mobile workers’ temporal and affective aspirations for work/life facilitate their investment in the Arctic’s labour markets and create value for growing industries?; 2) How does differential access to resources enable or constrain workers’ aspirational mobility and ability to manage insecure labour markets?; 3) What are the risks, costs, and benefits of such mobility and for whom? Answering these questions constitutes the project’s Objectives 1-3. Through an innovative focus on timescapes, this project further outlines how the ability to invest in economic futures is differentiated (Objective 4). Finally, the project develops the researcher’s skills in teaching, supervision, management and research to advance their career plan (Objective 5).

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз