Transformation of Work

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Description

WG1: Transformation of Work examines the decline of large-scale industry and the changing nature of the modern workplace, which has had significant effects on local communities and on individuals’ life perspectives. It seeks to develop slow memory concepts in relation to socio-economic analysis through exploring how remembrance practices can make visible economic transitions that are experienced unevenly and gradually. It brings methodological approaches to economic modelling and trends into dialogue with oral history techniques to develop new modes of narrating and visualising socio-economic change.

Banner: Rob Bogaerts / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Economic restructuring is intertwined with new (de)regulatory regimes and a neoliberal politics that entail a distinct framing of temporality and the meaning of the past. These developments have sometimes shut down traditions of working-class solidarity while facilitating populist mobilisation with new (and old) kinds of memory politics. The reverberations of these trends are felt locally and nationally and can be fruitfully compared across a wide variety of cases.

WG1: Transformation of Work considers a comparative and transnational
understanding of the local manifestations of socio-economic transformation as an
indispensable underpinning to the Action. It aims to develop slow memory concepts in relation to socio-economic analysis by exploring how remembrance practices can make visible economic transitions that are experienced unevenly and gradually. Methodological approaches to economic modelling and trends are brought into dialogue with oral history techniques to develop new modes of narrating and visualising socio-economic change.

The key stakeholders here are trade unions and community organisations, and this theme also seeks to build a platform with post-industrial communities to articulate, maintain and understand their past as a critical continuity. This will enable memory politics, so often the source of problems and tension, to become a force for constructive engagement and policy action. The transnational perspective will be maximised to share best practices, track labour markets and encourage the de-insularisation of perspectives.

Meet the other Working Groups

Transformation of Welfare

The current transformation of social welfare and growing inequalities in a slowly deteriorating care system lead us to seek a deeper understanding of how the future aspirations of community members are shaped and how these can be mediated through the practice of remembering. Bringing them together is the aim of WG2.

Transformation of Politics

Though extremism may be on the rise on both ends of the political spectrum, the mobilisation of right-wing forces in a diverse set of countries poses a particular threat to democratic systems of governance and to inclusive political cultures. WG3 will analyse these threats through the lens of memory studies in three ways. First, right-wing and anti-democratic actors skilfully employ the politics of memory to persuade supporters and to drive societal actors into particular policy directions.

Transformation of Conflict

Societies gradually emerging from violent conflict face multiple challenges when it comes to dealing with the transgressions of the past and rebuilding the future. The overwhelmingly dominant approach in contemporary conflict resolution is to confront memories and narratives of conflict with a view to find consensus and promote reconciliation. This working group aims to develop ways of creating space for bringing together diverging circumstances, perspectives, experiences and practices into continued contestation and open-ended dialogues. We conceptualize the “slow transformation of conflict” as a form of peacebuilding, which is always a process, never an event.

Transformation of the Environment

WG5 will progress the conceptualization of slow environmental remembrance by drawing on the expertise and experience of stakeholder practitioners (e.g. environmental action groups, artists, curators, and museums). The resulting transdisciplinary dialogues between theory and practice will conceive of ways that environmental crisis can be remembered in radically expanded timeframes, laying the memorial foundations for future environmental policy work, and the theoretical foundations for analysing the forms, ethics, and politics of memory work that addresses the climate and ecological emergency.

Training and Capacity Building

How do global and local societies confront their past? How to they contend with current environmental, economic and social change? These are some of the main questions WG6 aims to tackle through collaborative exchanges and cooperation. We would like to create a shared understanding of slow memory as an approach and methodology more specifically utilized as a tool in comprehending to global and local grand-scale transformations and responding to their urgency and exigency .

Dissemination and Communication

WG7 is chaired by the Science Communication Manager and will ensure that the Action has a clear online profile and communication strategy. It will also have overall responsibility for updating and implementing the dissemination plan.

COST

COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding organisation for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and beyond and enable researchers and innovators to grow their ideas in any science and technology field by sharing them with their peers. COST Actions are bottom-up networks with a duration of four years that boost research, innovation and careers.

COST Action CA20105

The SlowMemory COST Action addresses the need for increased interdisciplinarity in our understanding of how societies confront their past to contend with environmental, economic and social changes brought on by sudden events and by slow and creeping transformations.

Action Details

MoU – 045/21
CSO Approval date – 25/05/2021
Start date – 14/10/2021
End date – 13/10/2025

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