This edited book reimagines work, workers, and workplaces through decolonial and intersectional praxis. Bringing together contributions across sociology, gender studies, education, management, policy, and anthropology, it shows how coloniality continues to shape labour, care, knowledge production, and public institutions. Chapters explore anti-caste critique, Indigenous epistemologies, decolonial feminism, affective labour, and solidarities formed across uneven social locations.

The volume is organised in three parts: epistemic and pedagogical practices of unlearning coloniality; infrastructures of solidarity developed through collective organising, care, and policy work; and embodied territorial struggles in which body, land, memory, and labour are inseparable. Case studies range from education, business schools, and migrant academia to gig worker organising, queer digital movements, care economies, Indigenous Elders’ Circles, post-disaster Japan, policymaking in the Philippines, urban decolonisation in Germany, and feminist struggles in Mexico.

Advancing debates in the sociology of work, postcolonial studies, race and ethnicity studies, gender and queer studies, public policy, and management, this book offers a grounded account of how alternatives are imagined, enacted, and sustained within and against colonial-capitalist worlds.

Anukriti Dixit is an Advanced Postdoctoral Scholar and Lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies (ICFG), University of Bern, Switzerland. She is an anti-caste, decolonial feminist scholar who works on topics of gender-based violence, racism and colonially within policymaking and poststructuralist policy analysis. She works with feminist and critical theory, queer theory, using decoloniality, poststructuralism and intersectionality as method. She is a Swiss Government Excellence Scholar (2019-2020) and a Ford Foundation Grant Awardee (administered through the Institute of Social Sciences Trust, India). Her latest monograph is Anti-Sexual Harassment Laws in India (Palgrave Macmillan 2024).

Muneeb Ul Lateef Banday is Assistant Professor in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at Goa Institute of Management, India, and an advanced postdoctoral researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies (ICFG), University of Bern, Switzerland. Its research interests include analysing neoliberalism, (de)coloniality, gender, sexuality, caste, and ageing at work. Muneeb is particularly interested in the interrelationships among power, discourse, subjectivities and inequalities. Its research has been published in Journal of Business Ethics, Culture & Organization, Qualitative Research in Organization and Management, Gender & Development and The Gerontologist. Its monograph Neoliberal Subjectivities at Work was published in 2025.  

Patricia Purtschert is a philosopher and cultural scientist, as well as Professor of Gender Studies and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies (ICFG) at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She works within the fields of gender studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, social philosophy, poststructuralism, queer studies, feminist theory and critical theory. Her recent project, an oral history of feminist theory, gathers conversations with scholars who have profoundly shaped feminist thinking and thus exploring feminist theory as a living, contested, and collective practice.

Michèle Amacker is Professor of Gender Studies, and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies (ICFG) at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She works as a gender sociologist, focusing on precarious employment, precarious employment, social inequality, gendered division of labor, and the changing nature of work particularly in regards to the impact of digitisation on jobs in the retail sector. Her recent project examines public and (semi-)private actors in the field of foster child placement in Switzerland.