Nora Räthzel

I have undertaken research in many contexts exploring how individuals translate relations of gender, ethnicity, class and age into cultures of resistance and subordination. Workplaces, schools, neighbourhoods, and civil society organisations have been my sites of research. I have worked across disciplines with environmental psychologists, psychologists, political scientists, architects, geographers and feminist scholars, and across countries with colleagues in the UK, Brazil, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, India, and Germany.
My research falls into a number of themes: industrial relations, feminist studies, everyday racism, urban sociology, labour and globalization, environmental labour studies. With Diana Mulinari (Lund University) and Aina Tollefsen (Umeå University) I have sought to understand how processes of globalization impact on the lives of workers in the global north and the global south, examining transnational corporations from the standpoint of workers.
For the last 10 years I have focused on the relationship between work and nature. With David Uzzell (University of Surrey) I am developing the research area of 'environmental labour studies' (ELS) which explores the environmental policies of actors at work (workers, trade unions, managers) asking in particular what kind of relationship to nature as the source and condition for labour they imply.
My current research, undertaken with Diana Mulinari, David Uzzell and Ragnar Lundström aims to integrate environmental labour studies, labour process research, spatial analyses, and gender studies in an investigation of cooperatives in Spain, the UK and Sweden.