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Doing Gender in Public Services: Affective Labour of Employment AgentsGlinsner, Barbara, Sauer, Birgit, Gaitsch, Myriam, Penz, Otto, Hofbauer, Johanna January 2018 (has links) (PDF)
The restructuring of state bureaucracies into service organi
zations and the new welfare state paradigm of activation
have changed the work requirements of front-line workers
in public employment agencies across Europe. Public
employment agents are less engaged in bureaucratic labour,
but have to perform service work. They use affective means
to motivate and to monitor and sanction jobseekers. This
article provides evidence that these transformations in Aus
tria, Germany and Switzerland did not suspend the gender
ing of public service work. We discovered four typical
modes of affectively enacting the state: both male and
female employment agents follow feminized service work pat
terns or masculinized entrepreneurial norms. To prevent a
possible loss of their professional status, some employment
agents reinterpret affective labour as professional service
work that demands high expertise. Others resist the activa
tion paradigm by performing traditionally feminized care work
or by still adhering to affect-neutral male bureaucratic work.
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Exhibiting Performing Subjects : Curating Outsourced Performance Labour in Museum SettingsVigeland, Anne January 2020 (has links)
The thesis examines challenges museum curators face when outsourced performers – whose role it is to embody the work of other artists – are included in exhibition projects. The research questions are: What are the practical, juridical and ethical challenges that come with situating outsourced performance labour in the museum setting? What does the inclusion of live performance in exhibition projects mean for the role of the museum curator? Two exhibition cases in Stockholm are studied in the thesis: Marina Abramović – The Cleaner (2017) at Moderna Museet and Dora García, I Always Tell the Truth at Bonniers Konsthall (2018–19). The material consists of digital surveys that were sent out to employed performers from each exhibition case as well as interviews that were conducted with both performers and curatorial staff. The material was examined using theories on affective labour and the theoretical notion of de-skilling and re-skilling of acquired competences. The thesis shows that the practical challenges include the architectural conditions of museum buildings, insufficient prior knowledge on what working with performers entail, short project timespans and limited exhibition budgets. The juridical challenges include a lack of union recommendations for performance in museums and the difficulty of situating reperformances of historical works that in its form and duration may go against national labour regulations. The ethical challenges include commodification of performers’ subjectivity through instances of affective labour and mechanisms of objectification. In turn, both the outsourced performer and the museum curator turned performance curator inhabits a precarious working situation. The role of the performance curator is highly administrational and organisationally tedious in its positioning between curatorship, performing arts production and human resource management. Additionally, it entails a prodigious amount of affective labour in the reproductive mode – of emotional investments, conflict resolution and social liaison.
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"A book is not like any other commodity" : A qualitative study on Swedish bookfluencers, labour, and aspirations.Martina, Jonsson January 2023 (has links)
The thesis focuses on bookfluencers – content creators that create content about books and reading. The study explores how they perceive the gifted books they receive from book publishers and other actors, which they are expected to create content about – often unpaid. The aim of the thesis is to investigate the aspirations behind bookfluencers’ content about gifted books and their experiences of reading them. Furthermore, it explores unpaid labour on social media platforms and attachment to art as an aspiration. How do bookfluencers on social media differ from literary critics in traditional media? The study’s methodology is semi-structured interviews with 10 Swedish bookfluencers. The theoretical framework consists of the concepts of “affective labor” (Hardt, 1999, p. 89; Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 108), “aspirational labour” (Duffy, 2015, p. 443), “attunement” (Felski, 2020, p. 41) and “work-net” (Felski, 2020, p. 144). The analysis emphasizes on the labour behind creating content about gifted books, how bookfluencers position themselves and their content in relation to literary criticism, and the processes of attunement to books that they are gifted. Main findings are that seeing reading as an aspiration behind content gives bookfluencers a certain power to negotiate, despite collaborators’ demands. Defining themselves as book recommenders rather than literary critics may imply other expectations on their labour. Further, expectations from collaborators can affect bookfluencers’ reading experiences: the need to adapt their content to the book market can be seen as a form of affective labour. In the last section, the thesis discusses different processes that affect the reading experience of a gifted book, and how bookfluencers imagine getting paid for their work in the future. It problematizes how social media platforms do not pay their content creators. Thus, possible future research topics can explore bookfluencers’ relations to social media platforms and book streaming platforms further.
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Computation as Strange Material : Excursions into Critical AccidentsLagerkvist, Love January 2021 (has links)
Waking up in a world where everyone carries a miniature supercomputer, interaction designers find themselves in their forerunners dreams. Faced with the reality of planetary-scale we have to confront the task of articulating approaches responsive this accidental ubiquity of computation. This thesis attempts such a formulation by defining computation as a strange material, a plasticity shaped equally by its technical properties and the mode of production by which is its continuously re-produced. The definition is applied through a methodology of excursions — participatory explorations into two seemingly disparate sites of computation, connected in they ways they manifest a labor of care. First, we visit the social infrastructures that constitute the Linux kernel, examining strangle entanglements of programming and care in the world's largest design process. This is followed by a tour into the thorny lands of artificial intelligence, situated in the smart replies of LinkedIn. Here, we investigate the fluctuating border between the artificial and the human with participants performing AI, formulating new Turing tests in the process. These excursions afford an understanding of computation as fundamentally re-produced through interaction, a strange kind of affective work the understanding of which is crucial if we ambition to disarm the critical accidents of our present future.
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