Sara Cufré
Post-Doc Fellow
Sara Cufré is a feminist researcher from Argentina. She holds a degree in Political Science and a PhD. in Social Sciences (Universidad de Buenos Aires). She has conducted her doctoral and postdoctoral research at the Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales (CEIL) CONICET in Argentina. Also, she did a short research stay at the International Centre for Development and Decent Work (ICDD) in Kassel, Germany (fall 2020) and was an invited lecturer in the summer semester of 2022. Her work is related to labour conflict in the air transport industry. Her doctoral research was a case study on Aerolíneas Argentinas, the national flag carrier and it analyzed workplace conflict on the health and safety conditions of flight attendants and land operators during the re-nationalization process. She has also analysed the resistance and the international workers' organization against low-cost companies in Europe. Her current research is situated within Social Reproduction Theory and the Marxist Feminist debates on the labouring body. She teaches Social Sciences Methodology (Universidad del Salvador, Argentina) and is a member of the executive committee of ASET, the Argentinean Labour Studies Specialists Association. She has combined her academic trajectory with a strong engagement in the workers' and feminist movements. She believes other ways of producing knowledge are possible based on collective thinking, solidary co-working and reflective practices. She works in union training and popular education projects at the Global Labour University and has experience as an external consultant for developing diversity policies in organizations. Research The project ‘Building back’ meant no ‘better’: authoritarian practices and resistances of cabin crew workers in Argentina seeks to understand what are the connections between authoritarian practices, the materiality of the state and the precarization of work and life of aviation workers since the outbreak of the covid-19 crisis. The objective is to analyse how these processes impact the labouring bodies of cabin crew workers and how are they resisted. The project draws upon the analysis of Authoritarian Neoliberalism combined with Social Reproduction Feminism to analyse how workers resist the constant process of exploitation and the erosion of their working and living conditions. For this purpose, it studies the transformations in the Argentinean aviation sector and in labour relations that were intensified since the outbreak of the covid-19 crisis. The focus is on how such processes have been resisted by cabin crew workers and what transformative scenarios can be identified. It aims to produce knowledge about the strategies and dynamics of collective action led by different workers’ organizations. Empirically, it is focused on Argentina. Still, it aims to identify similarities and differences in the authoritarian transformations and transnational resistances in the aviation sector in the Global South and the Global North. This is a qualitative research project rooted in a scholar-activist perspective. It is based on a combination of key-informant interviews, secondary sources analysis and workshops with aviation workers to discuss the results of the investigation. This way, it seeks to comprehend the socio-political phenomenon of transforming working and living conditions and to collectively think of worker-driven tools to resist them.
