On 19 May 2026, our Research Group hosted a methodology workshop with Professor Benjamin Selwyn on designing critical global value chain research. Bringing together researchers at different career stages and disciplinary backgrounds, the workshop created a collaborative space to discuss conceptual and methodological challenges in researching class and (labor) agency across different sectors and GVCs. Participants included Caroline Hambloch, Kristina Großman, Oliver Pye and Michaela Doutch, as well as the PhD and Master students Jorma Apelt, Luis Baquero, Elise Kendall, Julie Sulser, Ohnmar Kin, Muntaza and Reza Halomoan. The presented projects span labor relations, contract farming, indigenous territorial struggles and political economy across the Philippines, Indonesia, Colombia and Malawhi.
The workshop began with an input by Benjamin Selwyn, who critically reflected on mainstream GVC approaches and emphasized the importance of placing class relations and agency at the center of labor research. Drawing on his own work, he discussed how agency can only be understood in relation to broader capitalist structures and highlighted the methodological challenge of linking local occurrences with wider political-economic processes. The discussion addressed questions of structural and associational power, labor regimes, gender relations, and the relationship between agency, politics, and class formation, as well as the big question “What story do we want to tell and for what purpose?”.
The main part of the workshop was dedicated to the PhD and Master students who presented their research designs and received feedback from Benjamin Selwyn and the group. Discussions covered diverse empirical cases, including labor agency in agricultural value chains, gendered labor relations, ecological transformations in the banana sector, patron-client relations in coffee production, and indigenous territorial mapping. Across these projects, participants reflected on methodological questions such as operationalizing class relations and labor agency, selecting appropriate units and scales of analysis, connecting local processes to national and global political economies, and designing feasible qualitative and mixed-methods research strategies.The final reflection highlighted several recurring themes that connected the individual research projects. A central question concerned how to empirically capture the relationship between structure and agency without losing sight of either dimension. Participants discussed the distinction between individual and collective forms of agency, the potential for everyday practices to develop into broader forms of labor politics, and the importance of integrating class, gender, ecology, and historical political-economic processes into analyses of global value chains. The workshop also encouraged participants to reflect on the broader purpose of critical labor research and how academic work can contribute to contemporary political debates and struggles. Overall, the workshop provided valuable conceptual guidance, methodological inspiration, and constructive peer feedback, helping participants further refine their research designs while identifying shared challenges and future directions for critical GVC research.