Global production increasingly unfolds within enclosed, extra-territorial industrial enclaves—walled zones that are tightly regulated, geographically confined, and socially separated from their surroundings. This is the case of Jordan’s Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZs) for clothing production, including the country’s largest such zone in Al-Hassan (Irbid). Concentrating the nation’s biggest cluster of garment factories exporting primarily to the United States, Al-Hassan today accommodates nearly 30,000 migrant workers—predominantly women recruited from across South Asia—who live in employer-provided dormitories within and around the industrial zone.
This presentation looks behind the concrete walls of Al-Hassan to illuminate the hidden labour sustaining the “Made in Jordan” label found on American sports and outdoor apparel. Drawing on ethnographic research that maps the zone through workers’ spatial orientations, everyday practices, and sensory environments, it examines the dormitory system and labour regime that underpin industrial productivity. At the same time, it foregrounds how workers navigate exhausting routines and forge temporary lives within these tightly regulated spaces. By tracing these social worlds, the presentation rethinks the exploitative dynamics, mechanisms of control, and stories of endurance and defiance that sustain—and at times unsettle—the infrastructures of global production.
Speaker: Dr Katharina Grueneisl
Katharina Grüneisl is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Nottingham and an affiliated researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis. She is a geographer and ethnographer whose research focuses on labour, markets, and urban transformation. Katharina’s work examines the global garment value chain, with fieldwork in Tunisia and Jordan, and has been published in MERIP, Environment and Planning A and E, Political Geography, Terrain, Suds, and REMMM. She works with participatory and cartographic methods at the intersection of spatial and artistic practice.
Date: Tuesday, 12 May 2026
Time: Amman 6 pm, London 4 pm
Location: CBRL Amman Institute and Online (Zoom)
Please note that this lecture will not be recorded.
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Registration:
Click here to attend in person at CBRL Amman Institute.
Click here to attend online via Zoom.
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Images Credits:
Foreground image: Garment factory in Jordan. (Grüneisl, 2024)
Background image: Worker dormitories in Al-Hassan. (Grüneisl, 2025)
