Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence This ground breaking book presents the first evidence of forced labour among displaced migrants who seek refuge in the UK. Through a critical engagement with contemporary debates about precarity, unfreedom and socio-legal status, the book explores how asylum and forced labour are linked, and enmeshed in a broader picture of modern slavery produced through globalised working conditions. Drawing on original evidence generated in fieldwork with refugees and asylum seekers, this is important reading for students and academics in social policy, social geography, sociology, politics, refugee, labour and migration studies, and policy makers and practitioners working to support migrants and tackle forced labour.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence This ground breaking book presents the first evidence of forced labour among displaced migrants who seek refuge in the UK. Through a critical engagement with contemporary debates about precarity, unfreedom and socio-legal status, the book explores how asylum and forced labour are linked, and enmeshed in a broader picture of modern slavery produced through globalised working conditions. Drawing on original evidence generated in fieldwork with refugees and asylum seekers, this is important reading for students and academics in social policy, social geography, sociology, politics, refugee, labour and migration studies, and policy makers and practitioners working to support migrants and tackle forced labour.

Globalization, the economic crisis and related policies of austerity have led to a growth in extreme exploitation at work, with migrants particularly vulnerable. This book explores the lives of the growing numbers of severely exploited labourers in the world today, questioning how we can respond to such globalized patterns of extreme inequality.

Both theoretical and empirical social science approaches to manual work in developing countries emphasize the infusions of power in social relations between workers and employers. But little attention has been paid to either the lived experiences of non-industrial and industrial manual workers or to the particularly physical character of their work. In Embodied Working Lives Louise Waite contributes to an expanded understanding of both. The concept of embodiment recognizes that bodies' habitual relations with the world engender subjectivities and life experiences. The most careful consideration of everyday-embodiment is found in the phenomenological tradition that theorizes 'incarnated consciousness' and 'embodied subjectivities.' This book follows such an understanding of embodiment, whose essence is to bridge the biological and the social. Waite incorporates embodiment into an ethnographic exploration of the worker-understood, in her study, to have 'personhood, ' preferences, and desires which play a part in social relations. Waite's situates the subjects of her study in a deeply dense context of social relations that sufficiently complicate our understanding of culture, work, bodies and embodiment, phenomenology, anthropology, and habit. This book is essential reading across the social sciences and in the humanities. It is a groundbreaking ethnography that raises interesting questions in applied phenomenology, humanist philosophies, and also policy studies