CITO Conversations

This seminar is titled "Investigate the frontline: performing an affective ethnography in a theatre workshop" by Laura Lucia Parolin, University of Southern Denmark & Carmen Pellegrinelli, University of LaplandLaura is an ethnographer who uses the Latourian ANT approach, familiar with SCOT and HCI, Carmen is a theatre director, producer, and playwright. Their research is in the areas of materiality, affectivity and embodiment examining diverse empirical settings. They will present work-in-progress that on an affective ethnography of a theatrical laboratory organised for/by the hospital staff in Bergamo as a form of collective therapy. If you remember the hospitals in Bergamo were acutely affected during the Covid pandemic.Organised by the UCD Centre for Innovation Technology and Organisation (CITO) - The seminar took place in-person on Tuesday, February 21st, 16.00-17.00 - in the Q026 Angela Moore Boardroom, Quinn School, University College Dublin. Introduction by Donncha Kavanagh, Professor of Information & Organisation, UCD College of Business. AbstractIn March 2020, Bergamo was hit by the first wave of the pandemic. More than 6.000 people have died in the area, where the emergency facilities lived in a stressful situation for months. In January 2022, a group of ER doctors and nurses from the main hospital in Bergamo - the frontline in the crisis - wanted to reflect collectively on their experience with the pandemic. The group set up a one-year-long theatre workshop involving around thirty colleagues from the ER. The workshop also aimed to prepare a theatre show, "Giorni muti, notti bianche" (Silent days, sleepless nights), presented in Bergamo's main theatre. By participating in the theatre workshop, we conducted a collaborative affective ethnography to investigate the dimension of affect in ER professionals' work practices during the first wave of the pandemic. This contribution focuses on affective ethnography discussing the characteristics and potentials of this (post)qualitative research method for organisational scholars.Laura Lucia Parolin (parolin@sdu.dk) is Associate Professor of Organizational Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. She is interested in the relationship between knowledge, body, sensitivity, affect, care, materiality, and innovation in work practices. She is currently visiting UCD, having been awarded a Carlsberg foundation grant.  Carmen Pellegrinelli (cpellegr@ulapland.fi) is finishing her PhD at Lapland University in the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her research interests are focused on creative practices, theatre and post-human philosophy. She is a professional playwright and director of theatre.AcknowledgementsMusic Title: Adagio in G minorArtist: Remo Giazotto attributed to Tomaso AlbinoniSource: https://soundcloud.com/dick-de-ridder/adagio-in-g-minor-albinoniLicensed by Dick de Ridder: CC-BY 3.0Cover Art Title: Digital IrisArtist: (no attribution)Source: digital_iris.pptxLicense: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0Podcast LicenseDesign Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0By taking part you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The seminar took place virtually on Wednesday December 9th, 2020AbstractMeaningful work is the idea that work holds an important role in the flourishing of societies and individuals. While there are many debates about what meaningful work is and whether we should take it seriously, this talk will focus on what I call the work-flourishing gap (WFG). Because work is a physical activity, there tends to be controversy as to how it can participate in those kinds of intellectual and imaginative activities we tend to associate with self-actualisation and flourishing. I will discuss how Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory of action (based on speech acts) can help dissolve the WFG by demonstrating how the activity of work bears features of linguistic meaning. This linguistic claim enables us to see work as more than just a bare physical phenomenon; it is communicative in the broad sense of being assertoric (locutionary), conventional (illocutionary), and transformative (perlocutionary). I will conclude with a reflection on some practical examples.About the speaker: Todd Mei is founder of the public philosophy and consultation organization Philosophy2u. He calls himself a `public philosopher’. It involves adapting abstract concepts and ideas from philosophy and employing them to frame new ways of understanding work as meaningful and virtuous beyond obligatory, functional or mere utilitarian views. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.