The Workplace as Public Space: Urban Socialities of Female Beauty and Retail Workers in Pakistan

• In Event: 1150 - Place Making and Urban Spaces

Abstract

Urban ethnographies explore social life in the city by focusing on the ghetto, the gated community, the neighborhood, and public space in general. The workplace is often overlooked in these analyses as it is not typically considered as a type of public space. Similarly, ethnographies of work, pay less attention to the urban socialities that intersect with the workplace and are produced through participation in the workplace. This paper brings the literature on work and urban life together to explore the workplace as a kind of urban space, which may not be a typical public space, but plays a central role in producing non-kin urban sociality. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an all-female marketplace in Karachi and in-depth interviews with beauty and retail workers, I explore the non-kin relations of working-class urban women. I find that the workplace is the dominant arena of sociality in their lives and that their non-kin relations are characterized by entangled intimate and economic ties, fleeting yet intense ties, and contradictory ideas of intimacy. This fraught and often unstable realm of non-kin sociality is shaped by a nexus of factors: the workplace itself, cultural patriarchal norms, and the urban landscape. These complex non-kin relations reveal that we need to further refine our categories for non-kin sociality in order to understand the rapidly changing contours of urban life in megacities in the global South.

Author

• Sidra Kamran, The New School