Dr Koyel Lahiri, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Moturi Satyanarayana Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences made a presentation at the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, the annual meeting of the New Directions in the Humanities Research Network with the thematic focus for 2026 being- Beyond Borders: The Role of the Humanities in Reimagining Communities. The conference, from 1-3 July 2026, was hosted by the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Lisbon, Portugal. Dr Lahiri’s presentation was titled ‘On Building Meaningful, Durable and Effective Workers’ Communities: Towards a Non-Materialist Understanding of Political Articulations, Desire and Discontent, and Movement Building’.
Abstract
A challenge that activists confront is the mystery of why workers eschew class identity for other competing identities, hurting their ability to protect workers’ rights. Dr Lahiri kept hearing trade union leaders complain: “Workers don’t want this, they have no unity…” Drawing from her ethnography with factory workers and street vendors in India, she explores how we can better understand/approach workers’ needs, desires and aspirations. Dr Lahiri argues that workers have a three-fold relationship with work, ie, at the site of work, and with the social and selfhood aspects of work. Desire and discontent can be located across all three registers, but labour scholars/activists do not pay enough attention to the latter two. Worse, their interventions tend to be inadequate or alienating, remaining trapped within inherited categories of past theoretical canons (eg a default assumption of unionisation as the most legitimate form of collective political articulation/mobilisation). Dr Lahiri approaches the open-ended question of what effective models of collectivism can look like by exploring connections between mind, self and world and their intersections with work, labour and workers’ movements. She proposes that in order to arrive at such models, we’ve to perhaps step back from post-Enlightenment materialist epistemological frameworks and ‘return,’ carefully and with rigour, into the older terrain of non-materialist frameworks. Dr Lahiri explores how such frameworks approach community and belonging, and embrace, rather than remain challenged by, questions of the Other, honour needs of individuals and the community simultaneously, and speak to the project of building enduring, progressive communities around work for workers.
