Post by Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Great news! The first episode of Season 3 of our Talk On podcast is now online. In this episode, Jovan Maud speaks with Anna-Lena Wolf about her book Labor on the Line: Justice at Work on Assam Tea Plantations, published by Cornell University Press in 2025. Labor on the Line takes readers to Assam, India, the world’s largest tea-growing region, to explore how everyday justice imaginaries emerge, gain prominence, evolve, and are negotiated among differently positioned actors involved in tea production. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Anna-Lena Wolf develops the concept of “justice at work” and shows how plantation laborers and trade unionists formed surprising alliances with plantation managers during a period of profound transformation in the tea industry. The conversation explores major shifts in the political economy of tea production, including the replacement of colonially inherited plantations with small tea growers, and what these changes mean for plantation workers. Anna-Lena Wolf offers a counterintuitive perspective on agency, arguing that it is not only expressed through resistance to established structures but also through the choices people make within them. The episode concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of her research and the potential of “justice at work” as a heuristic concept for understanding how justice imaginaries shape people’s possibilities to act (differently) beyond Assam’s tea plantations. https://lnkd.in/eR8z3_kA You can also listen to the podcast on the following platforms: Amazon Music: https://lnkd.in/ed68DjzJ Apple Podcast: https://lnkd.in/ebVbSt5U Deezer: https://lnkd.in/eZrNMm92 podcast.de: https://lnkd.in/ejP5BqiJ Spotify: https://lnkd.in/erMqedWG