Josie Hooker

PhD Researcher in Global Political Economy (ESRC 1+3)

Research supervisors: Dr Ana Dinerstein, University of Bath; Prof. Bridget Anderson, University of Bristol

Thesis working title: ‘It all adds up’: work-related health, precarity and ‘differential depletion’ – the case of low-paid, migrant service workers in London, 2020-2023

In my research, I explore how precarity is re-produced and contested through recent restructurings of labour, welfare and immigration regimes – and their articulations. Using feminist and decolonial approaches to Marxist political economy, my focus is on the gendering and racialisation of these processes and of the experience of precarity. Drawing from radical political theory and social movement studies, I'm interested in how such gendering and racialisation shape grassroots organising against and beyond precarity in Spain and the UK.

My PhD thesis engages more particularly with the question of work-related health as a dimension of precarity among low-paid, precariously-employed migrant workers in the UK. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the struggles of such workers over sick pay, workplace health and safety and income protection brought into sharp focus fundamental political questions about whose health is valued, protected and let to flourish in the world today, and whose health - and lives - are not. Grounded in these struggles, I ask:

• How do labour, social and border regimes mediate the health of low-paid, precariously employed migrant workers in the UK? How is their health differentially depleted under these regimes?
  
  
• What can this tell us about the contemporary social reproductive regime of capitalism and its production of ‘hierarchies of disposability’ that are fundamentally racialised, gendered and classed? To what extent and how are these workers produced as disposable, insofar as they are made vulnerable to death or ill-health? 
  
  
• What examples are there of contestation of these processes? How can we understand such contestation in relation to other social reproductive struggles of the present moment? What would greater attention to the politics of health mean for intersectional, emancipatory organising in, against and beyond precarity?

I’m committed to collective knowledge production using militant, participatory action, decolonial and feminist research methods and epistemologies.

Background

During my Masters of Research in Global Political Economy (2017-18), I undertook desk-based research on political economies of informality and criminal and state violence in urban sites in Mexico. During my Masters of Science in Environmental Governance (2010-12), I conducted research about state restructuring via welfare and third sector reform in the UK under post-2008 austerity, anchored in the experiences of participants of a government workfare scheme enrolled on placements in the environmental charity sector. 

My social justice work includes:

• CERTA Level 2 Award in Community Organising, Community CoLab, Bristol
• Member, ACORN community and tenants’ union, 2017-present
• Human rights observer, Mexico, Peace Brigades International (PBI), 2015-2016, and CAPISE, 2007
• Coordinator, Manchester Mule citizen journalism project, 2011-2012
• Freelance Researcher, Cooperative College, Manchester, 2010
• Editor, Shift Magazine, 2010-2013
• Political organiser, various collectives including Plan C, 2007-present on issues including: precarity and workplace, social welfare and services, race and migration, climate change, education, housing.
• Founding member, Plan B Housing Cooperative and community resource centre, 2009-2013

Academic positions held

• Committee member, SWDTP Decolonising Social Research project (2020)
• Research assistant, University of Bath, 2019. Evidencing and drafting a REF impact case study
• Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Bath, 2018-19
• Committee member, SWDTP Standing Seminar in Critical Theory (2018-present)
• Member, SWDTP student-led Participatory Action Research group (2017-18)
• Committee member, South West Research Cooperative (2017-18)

Publications

I've written in defence of activist research amidst urban segregation during the Covid-19 pandemic and on social reproduction and decoloniality in Veronica Gago’s work on urban informality and ‘neoliberalism from below’ in Argentina.

From 2010-13, I was part of the Editorial collective of Shift magazine, a place for analysis and debate of radical movements in the UK and occasionally beyond.

Hooker, J. (2020) Militant research and the epistemologies of pandemic segregation. Antipode Interventions [online]. Available at: https://antipodeonline.org/2020/08/06/militant-research-and-the-epistemologies-of-pandemic-segregation/

Hooker, J. (2019) ‘Crisis, revolt and geographies of coloniality’. Review of Neoliberalism from below: popular pragmatics and baroque economies, by Verónica Gago. Dialogues in Human Geography, 9(3), pp. 344–348. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2043820619871772?journalCode=dhga

Hooker, J. (ed.), 2012. Creating commonwealth and cracking capitalism: a cross-reading (Part II). An exchange between Michael Hardt and John Holloway. Shift Magazine, 15, pp. 20-24. Available at: https://libcom.org/library/creating-commonwealth-cracking-capitalism-cross-reading-part-ii-john-holloway-michael-ha

Hooker, J. (ed.), 2012. Creating commonwealth and cracking capitalism: a cross-reading (Part I). Shift Magazine, 14, pp. 13-17. Available at: https://libcom.org/library/creating-common-wealth-cracking-capitalism-cross-reading-part-i

Hooker, J. (ed.), 2011. An interview with John Holloway. Shift Magazine, 13, pp. 18-22. Available at: https://libcom.org/library/interview-john-holloway