Maybe of interest for some of you Apologies for Cross-Posting --- Dear colleague, we are pleased to send you the call for abstracts of the session///*It*//*’s a free work… When work relations become passionate.*/ Your contribution to the proposed session will be greatly appreciated! We take this occasion to remind you that the keynote speakers for the V Etnography and Qualitative Research Conference are *Michael Burawoy*, University of California Berkeley, and *Marc Abélès*, LAIOS – Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Institutions et des Organisations Sociales. On the conference website and below you can find the text of the call for abstracts. Proposals should be sent by*_Februay 17, 2014_ *to: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Please, also CC the conference address: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Each proposal, of a maximum length of 1000 words, should contain: • the title of your talk; • your contact details (full name, email address, post address and affiliation) and those of your co-author/s, if any. Contributions will be accepted both in*Italian* and *English*. Acceptance of proposals will be notified by March 17, 2014. Contributors must register by April 21, 2014 to be included in the program. With best wishes, Annalisa Murgia & Maurizio Teli — Call for abstracts V Ethnography and Qualitative Research Conference. Bergamo, Italy 5-7 June 2014 website: http://www.etnografiaricercaqualitativa.it/?p=13 * * *It’s a free work… When working relations become passionate* Convenors:/ Annalisa Murgia/ (Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento) & /Maurizio Teli/ (Fondazione <ahref, Trento) In contemporary knowledge society, both creativity and the ability to put into play personal resources are recognized as precious and valuable competences. With this workshop, we want to stimulate a reflection within the debate on free work (Beverungen et al. 2013; Chicchi et al. 2013), starting with the ambivalent meaning of the word free, referring both to the absence of a price and to the domain of freedom. We invite to elaborate on the double face of contemporary work: on one side, it is characterized by low or absent wages, it is so intrusive to become totalizing; on the other side, it is often based on informal registers, on subjects’ desire for freedom, and on the confusion between free time and working time. Drawing upon the contribution on free software development by the anthropologist Christopher Kelty (2008), we can frame this social phenomenon as the expansion of voluntary activities that intertwine with work activities in many forms. What is common among software developers – and among others who describe their work primarily as a passion – is not only the individual expression of creativity, but also the translation of the playful-affective dimension in recursive processes of relation, processes that bring to a preoccupation for the institutional, technological, political and economical conditions which the particular community and its productive activities are based on. These are, therefore, working experiences (paid or unpaid) in which the subjects’ identification and self-expression are conveyed both by putting life itself at work (Morini e Fumagalli 2010; Fleming 2012) and by questioning the social relations within which work is realised (Borghi et al. 2011). The proposed subject of analysis is as wide as heterogeneous, and it includes knowledge work, the creative industries and high tech production chains, emotional and caring work, all sharing the ambivalences of free work. What are the characteristics of the activities wherein subjects invest their affections and desires and that become incorporated by the rhetoric of work as a mission? If, on one side, free work makes economically valuable free expert activities, can it allow the emergence of new forms of collective action? How can we understand the main traits of such phenomenon, in particular from a methodological perspective?