CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop

Work, Ethics and Freedom

11–13 December, 2019

Venue: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany

Convenor: Chris Hann, Johannes Lenhard (for the Max Planck – Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change)

Keynote: 6.00pm, 11th December 2018, Wolfgang Streeck (title to be announced)

Explorations of the possibilities and perils of work in the twenty-first century are often animated by morally-charged ideas of human freedom. While such discussions oscillate between „soaring‟ conceptions of liberation from all constraints and abject evocations of any constraint as „subjection‟, anthropologists have generally sought to investigate how freedom is variably constituted through social relations and cultural values. In societies dominated by labour markets based on a principle of formally „free‟ wage labour, anthropologists have built on Karl Polanyi‟s approach to economy as „instituted process‟ to investigate comparatively how the exercise of freedom is shaped. Polanyi was worried about the implications of the “machine age” for democracy. What would he make of the gig economy that now flourishes alongside flexibilization and precaritization?

Bringing together anthropologists and social scientists working at the intersection of economy and ethics, we invite papers that draw on ethnography to explore how people conceptualize freedom in contemporary worlds of work, with a particular focus on:

• The subject of work
• Work as a process and experience
• Work and institutions, labour in and out of the market
• Labour relations and the politics of work
• The value and meaning of work

Proposals (up to 250 words) should be sent by email to Chris Hann (hann@eth.mpg.de) before 1st May 2019. Scholars whose proposals are accepted will have all costs reimbursed.

More information concerning the Max-Cam Centre can be found at: http://www.eth.mpg.de/4824356/Max_Cam