PhD training school and Symposium “Knowing How to Labor. (Disruptive) Knowledge in Global Labor”, April 13-16, 2026
The training school and symposium explores work processes and capital-labor relations embedded in informational regimes and highlights the dimensions of knowledge in the study of labor, focusing specifically on the knowledges and practices of workers and laboring populations, as opposed to the knowledge about labor generated by capital and the State. Broadly inspired by approaches that theorize these forms of knowledge as the basis of everyday acts of adaptation and resistance—including Michel de Certeau’s concept of tactics (2005) and James Scott’s notion of metis (1998)—the symposium will bring together researchers working on labor in a wide variety of (modern) regional and historical contexts— mostly, though not exclusively, in Latin America and the Caribbean and Asia—in order to inquire into the manifold ways of knowing labor employs to cope with and at times even counter the discipline it is subjected to.
To claim that there is a “knowing how to labor” implies recognizing that workers not only possess the knowledge necessary to carry out the tasks assigned to them by employers, managers, or planners of labor regimes, but also hold knowledge to navigate the conditions and adversities they face. This enables them—at times—to participate in acts of resistance and disruption. Disruptive knowledge, in turn, can foster rebellion, as suggested by approaches inspired by Subaltern Studies (Guha 1983). Yet, conversely, it may in the Scottian sense be the form of knowing that actually makes the conditions of laboring both bearable and possible, by disrupting the failures of management and planning that mark the disciplining of labor. Paradoxically, the latter disruption constitutes the nucleus for acts of subversion that challenge disciplinary regimes, but frequently serve to stabilize actually existing conditions of discipline and hierarchy.

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mwfdelhi (March 19, 2026). PhD training school and Symposium “Knowing How to Labor. (Disruptive) Knowledge in Global Labor”, April 13-16, 2026. Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF Delhi). Retrieved May 20, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/162y9

