Nov. 6 Xavier Garcia Curado

A public lecture presented by

Xavier Garcia Curado
University of Barcelona
Department of Social Anthropology
Grupo de Estudios sobre Reciprocidad (GER)

Wednesday, November 6, 2019
12:30pm
354 Academic Center

In the last 20 years approximately, the Spanish construction sector has experienced an unprecedented ups and downs. It is reflected in the phenomenon of housing bubble (2000 – 2007) and housing crisis (2007 – 2018). During the economic expansion times, this sector absorbed a large amount of labor, both autochthonous and migrant workers. When the bubble bursts, a lot of employment was destroyed and so many workers fell into a precarious situation. Because of the crisis, a competitive logic to get a job in the construction sector was imposed to the workers.

This colloquium is based on ethnographic work carried out on different everyday life spaces of construction workers of Barcelona and Metropolitan Area. At the same time, this ethnographic research is framed in a Research Project called “Popular notions of social justice in the face of the crisis and austerity policies”. The goal of the colloquium is to analyze some of the xenophobic conflicts emerged between construction workers in a context of recession and austerity.