The Struggle for Agency: Worker Resistance Narratives in Norway

Abstract

This chapter explores the empowering potential of research conducted with an activist orientation. It focuses on the story of four migrant workers employed in a Norwegian fish-processing plant, who, supported by the local trade union and along with 67 colleagues, resisted against exploitative working, employment, and living conditions. Meant as a study of the emergence and dynamics of criminological activism, this chapter reflects the capacities in which researchers tend to act to challenge the normalisation of state-corporate harms and to empower those victimised by these harms, as well as on the pitfalls of these approaches. In so doing, this chapter points to the parallels between state-corporate criminology, labour perspective on human trafficking, social harm, and zemiology. Ultimately, it calls for heightened reflexivity and critical intellectual distance from activist researchers.

Citation

Malik, H.M. (2023), "The Struggle for Agency: Worker Resistance Narratives in Norway", Canning, V., Martin, G. and Tombs, S. (Ed.) The Emerald International Handbook of Activist Criminology (Emerald Studies in Activist Criminology), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 199-213. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-199-020231014