Natalie Ashton (VU Amsterdam)
“Standpoint Theory, Neurodiversity & Flexible Working Arrangements”
The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing advancements in technology has greatly increased the prevalence and acceptability of alternative working arrangements such as remote and hybrid work, and flexible hours. There’s also some evidence that these events have prompted many workers to reevaluate their priorities, and their relationship to work, leading to reduced employee engagement and phenomena like ‘quiet quitting’. As employers navigate challenging decisions about the extent to which workplaces should return to ‘normal’ or instead normalise alternative arrangements, standpoint theory offers a potential framework for shaping the future of work in a way that benefits everyone.
In this paper, I will introduce standpoint theory, and connect its insights about lived experience to contemporary work. I will argue that workers are likely to be more productive when they play a meaningful role in the development of policies that affect them. I’ll then show that recent improvements in the understanding of neurodiversity highlight the importance of flexibility in these policies, and suggest that the benefits of flexibility go beyond neurodivergent workers, demonstrating trust and inviting higher engagement in all workers.
Michael Cholbi (University of Edinburgh)
“The Lonely Labourer (and their AI Colleagues)”
A number of governments have recently declared that their societies face crises of loneliness. When considering how to ameliorate such crises, it is tempting to see the workplace as a promising site for intervention, for it is there that individuals spend a large proportion of their waking lives, often surrounded by other people. Here I argue that this hope is largely misplaced, for though workplaces can alleviate ‘aloneness’, structural and organisational factors within workplaces, employment precarity, flexible work patterns, and evaluative priorities set by the wider values of work-centred societies make workplaces unlikely settings in which to counteract loneliness. Similar scepticism should greet the likely introduction of AI ‘colleagues’ into the workplace. For even if human workers and their AI colleagues can combine their agencies in productively collaborative ways, their relationships cannot be predicated on trust and shared vulnerability, preconditions for relationships that combat loneliness.
Hadar Elraz (Swansea University)
“A grassroot collaborative project for managing mental health at work”
This talk draws on an empirical case study based on a collaboration with a UK based social enterprise. To support the development and design of the tool, preliminary research on mental health management in the workplace was conducted. The empirical data collected provided new insights into how people’s mental health was affected by the COVID-19 lockdowns and the shift to remote working during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The tool was developed and designed with these circumstances in mind, recognizing the challenges associated with social isolation, compassion fatigue, burnout, and stigma as well as working remotely. The lived experiences of the employees with MHCs directly shaped the content. Both the development and design of the tool illustrated the countervailing discourses and ideas associated with MHCs. The tool was designed around the topics that the participants deemed to be most relevant to their own mental health and wellbeing challenges and by so doing empowered their own individual experience.
Leighton Evans (Swansea University)
“Harassed Unrest: The Phenomenological Condition of our Times (or how Unpoetically Man Dwells)”
In an age defined by digital managerialism and the infinite demands of contemporary work, this presentation explores the condition of “harassed unrest” as articulated by Heidegger and asks what it means to dwell in such a world. Contemporary labour is framed as a system of endless exposure and judgement, where the worker is always-on, always-failing, and increasingly alienated. Rather than freeing us, digital systems intensify pressure and strip away the possibility of rest, peace, or completion. This talk argues that the true plight of our times is not just material or economic, but phenomenological: we have forgotten how to dwell and are prevented from doing so by work. Drawing on Heidegger’s concept of poetic thinking, this talk asks whether—amid exhaustion, anxiety, and ontological insecurity—we can work, think and dwell outside of the ubiquity of harassed unrest.
Sarah Fisher (Cardiff University)
“The changing face of workplace communication”
In the wake of the generative-AI revolution, tech companies are racing to release powerful new tools for handling everyday communicative tasks—writing our emails, putting together briefings and presentations for us, and so on. On the one hand, delegation of such tasks promises to relieve us of much mundane work and free us up for more enriching endeavours. On the other hand, I suggest that it poses unacknowledged threats to our interpersonal interactions—interactions that are integral to the development of our communities and ourselves. Drawing on philosophical explorations of social meaning, I explain the importance of retaining sufficiently fine-grained control over the face we present through our speech.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril (University of Sheffield)
“Digital Third Spaces: Podcasting as recreational scholarship praxis”
No technology is innocent. Nevertheless, we can remain techno-ambivalent and still recognise how digital practices and virtual communities can be empowering. In this presentation I argue that, in the current technocratic landscape of neoliberal academia, marginalised scholars who struggle to find the will to remain in the industry need access to third spaces within their work. I believe participating in podcast production can be a kind of third space. Based on Maria Lugones' concept of playfulness and C. Thi Nguyen's idea of agential fluidity, I develop the notion of podcasting as "recreational scholarship", or a scholarly praxis that encourages us to challenge the norms around conducting research, engaging in participatory work, and the politics of output dissemination. In other words, I explore how podcasts, as an opportunity to engage playfully with our work, can carve out encounters in and around academic workplaces in a way that allows us to reconnect with the "why" and the "for whom" of our labour.
Matthew Wall (Swansea University)
“Are in-person meetings really 'better' than virtual ones? An analysis of participants' perceptions of public governance quality for in-person versus online UK local government meetings”
In the Spring of 2020, Covid-19 rendered existing in-person arrangements for democratic public governance meetings unsafe. This meant that alternatives had to be found for national and local Parliaments, Assemblies and Councils. Whilst many turned to virtual meetings, this was done on the understanding that meeting the in-person format was preferable for good governance - that is, that virtual public governance meetings were a compromise made necessary by the pandemic. In this paper, we explore this ‘natural assumption’, offering a nuanced approach, informed by social presence theory, that recognises different dimensions of governance. We posit trade-offs across sub-dimensions of governance quality that should arise in a deeper analysis of in-person versus online public governance meetings. Empirically, we draw on a survey of UK local government officials who experienced meetings of the same committees in both in-person and virtual formats. Our empirical findings differ from both the 'natural assumption' of in-person being a superior governance format and from more nuanced assumptions about the potential. We find that our survey respondents estimated that virtual meetings were superior to in-person meetings both overall and across all aspects of governance quality that our survey operationalised. The last part of the paper seeks to make sense of this surprising, but statically robust, finding.
Anna Bortolan (Swansea University)
“Emotional Labour and Digital Technology”
The aim of this talk is to explore from a philosophical perspective how the lived experience of emotional labour can be affected by certain uses of digital technology. After having outlined the kind of phenomena that are captured by the notion of emotional labour, I suggest that, within contemporary workplaces, this type of labour can have an oppressive character and perpetuate ableism. I then proceed to suggest that while certain forms and uses of digital technology can exacerbate these dynamics, others can be leveraged to create affective environments that are more diverse and inclusive.