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:
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
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?