The ways in which contemporary capitalism shapes the relations between work and home have become the subject of much debate since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. I suggest that this focus helps to not only analyze the pandemic’s politically regressive effects but also to grasp the progressive potential of new aid and solidarity initiatives that engage with products of this sort–but evidently do so for political ends different from those of racial capitalism. Through examples from the UK (where I live and work since 2011) and Turkey (where I am from and continue to do research), I point out an empirical focus that necessitates the sort of approach to spatiality I advocate: industrial products that traverse various sites and spatial scales of work where the pandemic’s related racialized effects unfold. I argue that such critique might benefit from an approach to spatiality that attends to the relationship between the different spaces and spatial scales across which the pandemic’s impact on working populations has unfolded, rather than simply considering space in the singular or multiple sites of work in isolation from one another. I do so by drawing on relevant critique from the past several months as well as aiming to advance its approach to the spatiality of the pandemic’s racialized impact on work. In this essay, I expound the racialization characterizing both the uneven distribution of precarity in question and the pandemic’s acceleration of its deadliness. Workers whose conditions are most precarious, whether due to underpayment or terms of employment, are also at highest risk of contracting the virus as they are obliged to continue working to make a living (and/or to help others live, as in the case of healthcare and social care workers)-while also lacking the privilege to work from home. The pandemic has also accelerated this distribution’s deadliness for those disadvantaged by it. He coronavirus pandemic has thrown into sharp relief the racialization that characterizes contemporary capitalism’s uneven distribution of precarity across the working population.
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