Precarious Culture and the Future of Work (BURA)
Starting from the definition of culture as a way of life and finding that in the conditions of global capitalism, precarity as a phenomenon largely characterizes and as a concept best defines not only the work and workaday lives of people but also their lives, the project explores precarious culture as a kind of given starting point (reflection) of the future of work. We are interested in how the uncertainty, fragmentation, and fragility of work and life situations manifest in various spheres: at the local, regional, and national levels, among specific professions and occupations, in the functioning of communities or among vulnerable social groups, in individual biographies. We arrive at insights through various research methods, ranging from interviews with informants and focus groups, through participant observation, to content analysis and discourse analysis. Through the same means, we seek to establish how and to what extent future work can be planned and the future of work imagined from precarious conditions, that is, which forms and aspects of work emerge as those that will shape our lives. In this sense, we examine the digitization of work and platform work; the blurring of work and personal life, work and leisure time, comes into our research horizon; we are interested in affective labor and social reproduction understood as a particular form of work and a way of dealing with challenges and crises.
