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The post-modern western city is going through two central changes in the organization of paid labour. One is the switch from production of goods to production of services, and the other is the increasing rift between well-paid labour with permanent jobs, and temporarily employed workers with low wages. Both of these processes are rasified and gendered, and strike harder against women, young persons and people of emigrant background. The flexible capitalism creates an informalization of the economy, breaking with earlier regulations of the labour markets, in which workers also need to find informal strategies in their individual and collective struggles. In this paper, I search for these “new” experiences of living and working in late capitalist society, by doing open interviews with three women of Latin-American origin, working without official permission (without documents) in the informal economy of Stockholm. Analyzing their narratives, I look for the agency and resistance that, according to my theoretical perspective, is part of everyday life of all suppressed subjects. I come to the conclusion that irregular systems of recruitment and other forms of interdependency could be useful for other groups of precarious workers. The interviewed women also use strategies such as fantasizing about a reversed world or focusing their thoughts on the future, and deceiving or avoiding the power(full), to cope with their everyday work situations and the contradictory class mobility they experienced in the migration. However, these strategies often reproduce an acceptance of power more than a resistance to it, and show us how the capitalism works as an hegemonic ideology incorporated in us all.

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En raison de certaines barrières structurelles d’accès à l’emploi qu’elles rencontrent, plusieurs personnes immigrantes nouvellement arrivées sont reléguées vers les emplois faiblement rémunérés et dits « peu qualifiés ». Dans le prolongement de ces dynamiques, des études montrent que les personnes issues de l’immigration sont surreprésentées au sein des plateformes numériques de travail, une forme d’emploi précaire en raison notamment des faibles salaires octroyés et de l’imposition d’un statut de travailleur autonome limitant l’accès à différents régimes de protections sociales. Malgré ce constat, peu d’études québécoises et canadiennes ont exploré le lien entre l’intégration socioprofessionnelle des personnes immigrantes et le travail de plateformes. À partir d’entretiens semi-dirigés réalisés auprès de 17 travailleur·euse·s de plateformes numériques de livraison de nourriture, ce mémoire s’interroge sur la place qu’occupent ces plateformes dans le parcours d’intégration socioprofessionnelle des nouveaux·elles arrivant·e·s au Québec. Les résultats de cette enquête exploratoire portent à adopter un regard nuancé sur la situation des personnes immigrantes nouvellement arrivées et travailleur·se·s de plateformes. Malgré leur haut niveau de diplomation et leurs expériences de travail antérieures, la majorité des participant·e·s n’était pas parvenue à occuper un emploi correspondant à leurs qualifications et à leurs attentes dans les mois et les années suivant leur arrivée au Québec. Avant de travailler sur les plateformes, ils et elles s’étaient d’abord tourné·e·s vers le travail salarié déqualifiant, faiblement rémunéré et qui les exposait à plusieurs contraintes de travail. En dépit des conditions de travail précaires offertes et des nombreuses insatisfactions exprimées par les participant·e·s, les plateformes numériques de travail représentent néanmoins une alternative avantageuse puisqu’elles s’accompagnent parfois d’une meilleure rémunération, d’un moindre effort physique, ainsi que d’un plus grand contrôle sur les heures et horaires de travail. Pour l’ensemble des participant·e·s, le travail de plateforme constitue une activité temporaire et s’inscrit plus largement dans des projets professionnels et migratoires – dans le cas des résident·e·s temporaires -, mais aussi dans un contexte marqué par la pandémie de COVID-19. Le passage au travail de plateforme constitue une forme de stratégie mobilisée par les participant·e·s pour surmonter les différentes contraintes – économiques, conciliation des sphères de vie, statut migratoire restrictif - rencontrées dans le cadre de leur parcours d’intégration socioprofessionnelle et faciliter le passage à une situation favorable. / Due to certain structural barriers to accessing employment, many newly arrived immigrants are relegated to low-paying, so-called "low-skilled" jobs. As an extension of these dynamics, studies show that people of immigrant background are overrepresented in digital work platforms, a form of precarious employment due in particular to the low wages paid and the imposition of a self-employed status that limits access to various social protection schemes. Despite this observation, few Quebec and Canadian studies have explored the link between the socio-professional integration of immigrants and digital platforms. Based on semi-structured interviews with 17 workers of digital food delivery platforms, this thesis examines the role of these platforms in the socio-professional integration of newcomers to Quebec. The results of this exploratory study suggest a nuanced view of the situation of newly arrived immigrants and platform workers. Despite their high level of education and previous work experience, the majority of participants had not managed to find a job that matched their qualifications and expectations in the months and years following their arrival in Quebec. Before working on the platforms, they had first turned to low-skill, low-paying salaried work that exposed them to several work constraints. Despite the precarious working conditions offered and the many dissatisfactions voiced by the participants, digital work platforms nevertheless represent an advantageous alternative since they are sometimes accompanied with better pay, less physical effort, and greater control over working hours and schedules. For all the participants, platform work is a temporary activity and is part of their professional and migratory projects - in the case of temporary residents - but also in a context marked by the COVID-19 pandemic. The transition to platform work constitutes a form of strategy mobilized by the participants to overcome the various constraints - economic, reconciliation of spheres of life, restrictive migratory status - encountered in the course of their socio-professional integration and to facilitate the transition to a favorable situation.

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While New Public Management practices (NPM) have been adopted in academia and higher education over the past two decades, this paper is investigating their role in a specifically socio-philosophical way: The preeminent question is what organization of science is likely to make science and research work well in the context of a complex society. The starting point is an obvious intuition: that academia would be “economized” by NPM (basically, that something is coming from the outside and is disturbing the inside). Habermas provides a sophisticated theorization for this intuition. In contrast, the thesis advanced here is that we should consider NPM potentially problematic—but not for descending from economics or administration outside academia. It is because NPM often cannot help research and science to function well. In this (rather “essayistic” than strictly deductive) consideration, I will therefore tentatively discuss an alternative approach that takes up critical intuitions while transposing them into a different setting. If we understand science and research as a form of life, a different picture emerges that can still bring immanent standards to bear, but at the same time compose them more broadly. This outlines a socio-philosophical critique of NPM. Accordingly, the decisive factor is not NPM's provenance. What is decisive is that it addresses some organizational problems while at the same time creating new ones. At the end, an outlook is sketched on how the specific situation of NPM allows some hypotheses on academy's [by “academy”, I am referring to the whole research community (like “academia”)] future organization. Ex negativo, it seems likely that qualitative evaluation criteria and creative freedom will have to play a greater role.

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This thesis examines strategies of anticipation in contemporary post-cinematic art. In the Introduction and the first chapter, I make the case for anticipation as a cultural technique for the construction of and adjustment to future scenarios. This framing allows analysis of constructions of futures as culturally and media-historically specific operations. Via anticipation, constructions of futures become addressable as embedded in specific performative and material economies: as regimes of prediction. The hypothesis is that cultural techniques of anticipation do not only serve to construct particular future scenarios, but also futurity, the very condition for the construction of futures. Drawing upon the philosophical works of, in particular, Vilem Flusser, Jacques Derrida and Elena Esposito, and the theory of cultural techniques, I conceptualize anticipation through the analysis of post-cinematic strategies. I argue that post-cinematic art is particularly apt for the conceptualization of anticipation. The self-reflexive multi-media interventions of post-cinematic art can expose the realisms that govern regimes of prediction. Three cultural techniques of anticipation and their use as artistic strategies in post-cinematic art are theorized: enactment, soft montage and rendering. Each of these techniques is examined in its construction of futures through performative and material operations in art gallery spaces. The second chapter examines strategies of enactment in post-cinematic installations by Neïl Beloufa. My readings of Kempinski (2007), The Analyst, the Researcher, the Screenwriter, the CGI tech and the Lawyer (2011), World Domination (2012) and Data for Desire (2014) propose that enactment allows for an engagement with futures beyond extrapolation. With Karen Barad's theory of agential realism, the construction of futures becomes graspable as a political process in opposition to a mere prolonging of the present into the future. The third chapter focuses on the strategy of soft montage in works by Harun Farocki. I interpret Farocki's application of soft montage in the exhibition Serious Games I-IV (2009-2010) as a critical engagement with anticipatory forms of organizing power and distributing precarity. His work series Parallel I-IV (2012-2014) is then analyzed as a speculation on the future of image production technologies and their role in constructing futures. The final chapter analyses the self-referential use of computer-generated renderings in works by Hito Steyerl. The installations How Not To Be Seen (2013), Liquidity Inc. (2014), The Tower (2015) and ExtraSpaceCraft (2016) are read as interventions in the performative economies of contemporary image production. I argue that these works allow us to grasp the reality-producing and futurity-producing effects of rendering as anticipatory cultural technique. My thesis aims to contribute to the discussions on a 'turn towards the future' in contemporary philosophy and cultural criticism. My research thus focuses on the following set of questions. What can we learn about the operations of future construction through encounters with post-cinematic art? How are futures and future construction framed in such art? What realisms do future constructions rely on? And how can anticipation as a cultural technique be politicized and democratized?

Text in English / The ‘doing’ of gender in our society is constructed along the lines of power, knowledge and being. Power structures angle knowledge and understanding of transgender people and transgender lives in a way that relegates them almost to the museum to be observed as a spectacle or exotic objects. The emphatic frames of man and woman, even in South Africa where the Constitution is considered and understood to be liberal and generous, the life of a transgender body is an Other life. One is either male or female; any other form of doing and being gender suffers peripherisation and classification as special, different, strange or any other exteriorising definitions. This dissertation attempts to question the power or the tyranny of categorisations and classifications of man and woman, drawing from various discourses such as the medico-legal discourse classification. It further looks at how gender is being performed by transgender people. Further it aimed at gaining an in-depth understanding of the experiences and challenges of transgender people with regards to doing gender within a gendered society. The findings within the dissertation tells us, that the performativity of gender is not a neutral space, but enacted by various power structures and those who live outside the norms such as the transgender people, they are subjected to precariousness. It this dissertation seeks to contribute to an unmasking of some easy but harmful assumptions about gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality may not be taken for granted and assumed according to fixed templates but they are fluid, mobile and flexible beyond the limits of convention. / Psychology / M.A. (Psychology (Research Consultation))