Global Workers and Entangled Crises: Biographical and Relational Approaches to Resilience

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The early 2020s brought a torrent of disruptions – COVID-19, war-amplified inflation and migration blockages – that reshaped global labour in uneven and deeply unequal ways. Across the Global North and South, vulnerable workers faced deteriorating conditions, fractured livelihoods and growing distrust as chronic uncertainty was compounded by socio-economic and political shocks. Moving beyond policy-driven models focused on human and social capital, this edited collection offers a variety of novel biographical and relational approaches to studying resilience that all centre on workers’ lived experiences, histories and networks. Drawing on rich fieldwork across multiple countries, the authors show how past crises, care obligations and collective ties both enable resilience and generate new burdens. Bridging biographical research methods, social reproduction theory and development studies, this book shows that resilience is a relational process shaped by inequality, gender, migration and labour struggle.