To comprehend the co-dependence and rivalry between China and India and their global implications, this chapter invites and enables readers to think from and with the two countries by pointing to the often ignored leftist science populism that underlines Global South societies’ management of the dual-task of modernisation and globalisation. This helps to identify the latent effects in the two countries’ selective global outreach and to understand their limits in leading South-South collaboration. The chapter first elucidates the concept of leftist science populism and its political logic. This helps to contextualise the gap between the two countries’ official views and actual practices in R&D exchanges and the latent effect of the two countries’ global expansion, which is discussed in the second section. Finally, the COVID vaccine diplomacy exhibits the two countries’ latest struggle to gain a better position in the global epistemic hierarchy. Whereas China’s vaccine diplomacy can be summarised as ‘contrast, collaborate and calumniate’, India adopted an approach that resembled ‘contest, convert and control’. Yet they both experienced some setbacks due to a deficiency in soft power, which is necessary to bring quality change in how science is applied and evaluated.

Disciplines have myths of origin, canonical accounts that, far from being innocuous, form and mould how bodies of knowledge exist, operate and reproduce themselves today. Their (hi)stories should not be taken as given, but one should rather ask which voices are being privileged and which ones are rendered as non-relevant, since past silences echo in present times and in present tensions. By examining the racial contours of urban policies in the Portuguese context, it became evident how debates on race and racism were absent from academic knowledge production in Urban Studies, and particularly in Urban Anthropology. Despite the proliferation of academic works on peripheralised territories in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area – mostly inhabited by black and Roma populations and particularly subjected to State surveillance and repression – there were practically no debates on institutional racism nor violence. This chapter is a journey through several cities, (public) libraries, books and authors. It is a journey to understand why Urban Anthropology has been evading race and racism as a possible lens to understand urban segregation and inequalities. As I argue, these silences are a refraction of a more deep-rooted racist assumption about who and what is considered to be a worthwhile and pertinent subject of science. In short, I show how epistemic silences are indeed issues that reveal the persistence of epistemic apartheid (Rabaka, 2010) that has been silencing both black authorship and racism, thereby leaving racial residential segregation unchallenged.

The chapter discusses the nexus of industrialisation and urbanisation with modernity through the analysis of debates among elites in the 1860s and 1870s in Buenos Aires. It examines a pivotal controversy concerning industry that occurred when a series of epidemics struck Buenos Aires. The dispute revolved around the presence in the city of meat-salting factories, which were considered among the possible causes of disease. Against this background, elites debated the role of industry in cities and its connection with imaginaries of urban modernity, especially as it was articulated alongside the opposition of progress and backwardness. The chapter combines insights from postcolonial studies and global history with dependency theory. Deconstructing the inclination to consider Latin American elites as entirely subjugated to European and North American imperialism, the analysis underlines their ambivalent position vis-à-vis the discourses of European modernity. The chapter underlines the agency of Buenos Aires’ elites, whose desires and projects were deeply rooted in their local context. At the same time, drawing inspiration from dependency theory, the chapter highlights how the imagination of Buenos Aires’ elites developed within the constraints of the hegemony of what I designate a ‘hyperreal’ European urban modernity. Focusing on the specific case of industry, the chapter shows both the locally rooted character and the Eurocentrism of the desires of local elites. The chapter shows the ambiguous character of Eurocentrism and questions one of the main features of the Eurocentric discourse of urban modernity, the nexus between industrialisation and urbanisation.

Chapter 5 reviews the previous debates and comments on the scale and extent of fragmentation of work and employment conditions, regulations and diminished power sources. It then charts three broad future vistas, connecting to political trajectories and a reinvigorated role for the state and agents shaping power at work and the importance of people first in future policy debates.

Chapter 1 introduces the key ideas, themes and perspectives underpinning the book. Important concepts and frameworks of power associated with changes in work and employment are introduced; and the ‘work and employment studies’ approach adopted in the book is explained. The core content of the book is also outlined and mapped against six shifting dimensions shaping labour agency in the workplace.

Chapter 3 unpicks the regulatory context of worker voice and influence. It analyses how the general nature and role of the state has changed and continues to evolve; the influence of policy positions and legal intervention on employment relations; and institutional responses to gender inequality and labour migration. It contends that the world of work and employment has been decollectivised by bogus self-employment and individualised employment rights.