Ramsha Usman

USMAN RAMSHA, then a graduate student at University of California, Santa Barbara, California, received funding in April 2023 to aid research on “The Labor of Being “Able”: Injury and Care in Pakistan’s Industrial Zones,” supervised by Dr. Mary Hancock. This project investigates how industrial workers navigate the categorizations of “fit to work” from Pakistan’s worker-welfare system, and how doctors and workplace managers use ability vis-à-vis work to shape their health and wellbeing. Approaching bodily ability as a culmination of discourses and practices, this project asks: What does injury as an evolving socio-material entity, reveal about disabling systems of production, the political nature of care, and the relationship between systems of work and care? Through an ethnographic study of the interpretations of injuries, the grantee shows how the public-private welfare system is entangled with private factories in categorizing and operationalizing bodily ability. Further, the project shows how worker-welfare systems and industries are evolving with non-governmental bodies’ promotion of “sustainability”. These sustainability programs seek to redefine how and what support should be provided for different injuries as worker health becomes a way to sustainable industrial development. While these programs were framed as “sustainable,” workers often found themselves stuck between work and medical care, dealing with new categorizations of dis/ability to access compensation or time off work. In tracing the socio-material life of an injury, this project highlights workers’ experiences with an evolving welfare system and an industry aspiring to become sustainable.