Towards Recognition and Redistribution: Solidaric demands and subaltern subjectivities in Bangladeshi jute mills

This study develops a solidaric theory of organizational recognition through learning from one of the world’s most disenfranchised group of workers: women working in Bangladesh’s jute mills. Drawing on Nancy Fraser and Richa Nagar’s theoretical concerns with justice-seeking as central to subaltern modes of recognition, this study explores the gendered potential and limitations of solidaric recognition as constituted through institutionalized patterns of interpretation and valuation. Through a qualitative, in-depth study of a state-owned jute mill in Bangladesh that spanned over 10 years, our analysis focuses on how solidaric modes of recognition are both enabled and constrained through place-based, corporeal and diasporic conditions and socio-religious and economic experiences. In paying close attention to the interplay between political-economic and localized conditions that inform organizational subjectivities, we show how solidaric recognition, as an ontologically generative site for worker subjectivity, is inseparable from the broader socioeconomic conditions of provisional work.