Francesca Pugliese

Francesca Pugliese is currently working in the ERC-funded WORKINMINING project as a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Liège and in History at Leiden University (Graduate Programme African Studies).

At the moment, she works in the WORKINMINING project, a collective and comparative research project dealing with the micropolitics of work in the mining sector of the Congolese and Zambian Copperbelt. Her subproject focuses on the employees of the transnational mining companies in the Copperbelt region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, an area marked by the strong legacy of industrial paternalism. She is interested in studying the multiple dimensions of the work experience, the implications for the intimate life of the workers and gender and generational dynamics. More specifically, her research focuses on the perspectives of Congolese workers and their social and cultural responses to the changes brought about by the recent boom in the mining industry. Different categories of male and female Congolese workers – executive, skilled, and unskilled workers – and their families are taken into consideration in order to understand how they cope with management practices and discourses within the new transnational mining companies. Overall, her project studies the historical, economic and social impact of mining companies’ activities and macro-economic developments in Africa from a bottom-up perspective. She is in the process of writing her PhD dissertation.