Speakers: Bhanupriya Rao (Behanbox) and Michael Odijie (Oxford)
‘Honorary labour’: Women’s Labour and the Political Economy of Care
Bhanupriya Rao (Behanbox)
1 million women form the edifice of India’s care and health infrastructure. Yet, they are not employees of the state. They are designated as ‘volunteers’ and paid an ‘honorarium’. Drawing on the investigative journalism and data-driven archives of Behanbox’s “ASHA Story”, my talk examines the lived realities of India’s care providers and how the “honorary” status of frontline health workers (ASHAs and Anganwadis) serves as a legal and economic mechanism for state-sanctioned exploitation and feminised notions of care institutionalised in policy and governance.
Bhanupriya Rao is the founder of Behanbox-a feminist digital platform that does deep dive reportage on issues from a lens of gender and marginality in India. She is a passionate advocate for just and democratic governance and policy making. For two decades, she had been involved in grassroots movements like Right to Food, Work and Information and working with civil society groups in strengthening governance and welfare delivery systems.
Subsidising Chocolate: Unfree Labour and Everyday Exploitation in West Africa’s Cocoa Economies
Michael E. Odijie (Oxford)
This talk draws on my forthcoming book project on labour exploitation in West and Central African cocoa economies to rethink “unfree labour” beyond the language of exceptional criminality. I argue that unfreedom is often produced structurally—through low and volatile farm incomes, seasonal labour bottlenecks, frontier expansion, and systems of intermediation that blur responsibility and make exit costly for workers. These conditions generate a spectrum of coercive ties, including indebtedness, wage withholding, dependency on patrons or recruiters, and the normalisation of unpaid family and children’s work as a coping strategy. In conversation with labour struggles in India’s care economy, the talk offers a cross-regional lens on how essential work becomes systematically undervalued—and what a worker-centred approach to reform would require.
Dr Michael Ehis Odijie is an Associate Professor of African Studies and African History, holding a joint appointment between the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and the Faculty of History. He is Nigerian, and his research focuses on a range of historical and contemporary themes in West Africa, including local networks against slavery and labour exploitation, the cocoa value chain, EU-Africa relations, and the politics of development.
All are welcome
Enquiries: asian@sant.ox.ac.uk or 01865-274559
