School of Geography - Theses

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Author: Skerritt, Jesse × Type: Honours thesis × Subject: affect ×

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    Changing Vibes, Precarious Lives: The Experiences & Hardships of Melbourne 'Hospo-Workers' During the Covid-19 Pandemic
    Skerritt, Jesse ( 2023)
    In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic engendered a series of economic and social crises along intersecting fault lines and through multiple spatialities. These crises impacted local and global economic flows, reshaped urban spaces, produced new (im)mobilities, and intensified the vulnerability and exploitation of precarious individuals and communities. This thesis seeks to explore how workers in Melbourne’s hospitality sector were impacted by the pandemic; how their work changed, the hardships they experienced as a result, and the tactics they developed to respond to these hardships. The thesis builds on pre-existing research on labour and precarity to affirm the affective nature of work, and the extent to which precarity has become a predominant condition of economic and cultural life. By conducting a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with individuals who worked in Melbourne’s hospitality sector during the pandemic, it expands geographic understandings of the cultural and economic geographies of hospitality and its labour-market. It also conceptualises how individuals identify and express affective attachment to hospitality work by developing a typology around respondents’ colloquial invocation of ‘hospo’ and ‘vibe’. This thesis also elucidates how respondents enacted a range of tactics which resisted oppressive and exploitive management strategies across embodied and digital spatialities. It concludes that, despite economic, emotional, social and embodied hardships experienced during the pandemic, ‘hospo-workers’ demonstrated individual and collective capacities for agency, enacting them in the hopes of destabilising the entrenched exploitation and flexibilisation of labour in the hospitality sector, and strengthening the networks of care and social connections that emerge amongst workers in Melbourne venues.