Katharina Grüneisl, PhD

Arbeitsvorhaben

Breathless Lives of Global Fashion: Respiratory Struggles of South Asian Workers in Jordan’s Dormitory Migrant Labour Regime

In Jordan’s garment industry, South Asian migrant women produce clothing for major American brands while living and working in tightly controlled industrial zones. Their daily lives unfold between factory floors and dormitories, where long shifts, airborne cotton dust, overcrowded rooms, and pervasive pollution combine to produce a persistent sense of suffocation. Workers often describe this experience in Hindi or Urdu as dam ghutna—a condition that captures both respiratory strain and the feeling of being physically and emotionally confined.
Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this project traces how breath becomes a central site through which feminised labour migration and industrial production are experienced and understood. It examines how women workers locate respiratory risk across the spaces they inhabit—from factory interiors to dormitories and the wider industrial zone—and how these environments shape their physical and mental capacities to endure the present and imagine possible futures. Participatory and arts-based methods, including body and environmental mapping, are used to engage forms of embodied knowledge that often remain difficult to articulate.
Attending to breath also offers a conceptual bridge between feminist political economy and feminist political ecology, revealing how global clothing production depends on overlapping forms of human and environmental extraction. Breath foregrounds the entanglement of racialised and gendered bodies with air, infrastructure, and industrial environments across a South–South migration corridor. At the same time, breathlessness emerges as a relational condition that connects bodies to one another and to their surroundings. Breath can thus be reconfigured from a sensation of exhaustion into a potential ground for new forms of collectivity and care. In this way, the project rethinks workers’ health beyond the confines of the workplace, situating it within the broader ecologies and extractive dynamics that shape life and labour along one of the world’s most feminised and labour-intensive value chains.

Recommended Reading

Grüneisl, Katharina (2023). “Becoming ‘farazat’: Re-examining Feminisation from a Tunis Used Clothes Sorting Factory.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 56 (3): 736–750. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231217442.
– (2025). “Governing Through Extra-Territoriality: Jordan’s Clothing Production Zones as Tools of Imperial Power and Authoritarian Rule.” Political Geography 123: 103430. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103430.
– (2025). “Limits of Circularity: Examining Ruptures to Valuation Work in Tunisia’s Used Clothing Economy.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, ahead of print, February 9. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486251317415.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Grüneisl, Katharina (London, 2025)

Limits of circularity : examing ruptures to valuation work in Tunisia's used closing economy

Grüneisl, Katharina (Amsterdam [u.a.], 2025)

Governing through extra-territoriality: Jordan’s clothing production zones as tools of imperial power and authoritarian rule

Grüneisl, Katharina (London, 2023)

Becoming ‘farazat' : re-examining feminisation from a Tunis used clothes sorting factory