Dress Work - Precarious Urban Labour Markets and the Intimate Materialities of Immaterial Labour
Research Question
How do workers navigate insecurity and vulnerability in labour markets and what can we learn about this navigation by looking at the practice of dressing for work?
Project Description
Dress work is the everyday practice of dressing the body for work. This project looks at insecurities and vulnerabilities in the current labour market through the lens of aesthetics and this practice of dressing for work. How do workers navigate insecurity in the labour market? How can a dress or a jacket help to feel more secure? How do workers create protection by wearing certain types of clothing? How do they try to produce comfort at work through dressing?
Selected Publications
Berg, Marguerite van den & Laura Vonk. (2020). The new discomforts of precarious workers: Wardrobe matter, insecurity and the temporality of calibration in dress work. The Sociological Review, 68(3) 574–589
Berg, Marguerite van den & Josien Arts. (2019). Who can wear flip-flops to work? Ethnographic vignettes on aesthetic labour in precarity. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 22(4), 452-467.
Berg, Marguerite van den (2019). Precarious masculinities and gender as pedagogy: aesthetic advice-encounters for the Dutch urban economy. Gender, Place & Culture, 26(5), 700-718.