Open Space seminars
| Dates: | 19 November 2015 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Manchester Urban Institute |
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Open Space aims to facilitate dialogue between advanced PhD students, early career researchers and academic staff across academic disciplines on urban-related themes. The initiative is funded through the support of cities@manchester.
This event features two speakers:
Kelvin Charles (SoSS - Politics) - Occupy and the Biopolitics of Encampment
"My research approaches the 2011 Occupy movement through the theoretical framework of biopolitics. Specifically, I investigate the claim that the Occupy movement was the emergence of the multitude on the streets. I claim that the theoretical framework and the practical experiences of protest centre around three issues that I highlight as democratic organisation, digital dissemination of information and the contestation of the urban. I situate the camp as integral to the abilities of activists to draw together these various processes of protest. I argue that the biopolitical approach enables a complex and nuanced discussion of the ways in which the movement is able to create interrelated accounts of political, economic and social critiques through a reconceptualization of the political."
Jon Las Heras (SoSS - Politics) - From Bad to Worse: Mapping (Spanish) Trade Union Strategies within the (European) Automotive Industry
"The globalization of industrial production has been accompanied by the increasing automation, outsourcing and off-shoring of the labour process with the aim to increase corporate profitability while, simultaneously, dis-empowering labour’s collective power. Within such general framework, my research focuses on understanding and explaining (Spanish) trade union strategies within the (European) automotive industry. First, I will briefly explain how Trade Unions and Trade Union Power may be conceptualised by building upon the literature on State Theory. Thus, we may define Trade Unions as a social relation that institutionalises the collective power and strategies of particular (hegemonic) working class fractions vs. capital and other working class fractions. This definition may be a useful theoretical twist to de-reify working class power in order to understand better the structural limits that it confronts. Second, a three dimensional map (along space-scale, wage-scale and employer-scale dimensions) will be presented in order to understand the socio-spatial dimension of Trade Unions and Industrial Relations in general. This will help us to generate a stylized map of both capitalist pressures to divide and rule the capital-labour relationship and, as well as, to identify trade union strategies that seek some monopolistic power in the labour market. Finally, the construction of this “war-map” will be supported with a brief presentation of three case studies that reveal the steady dis-empowerment of the working class as different collective bargaining rounds were played out. The historical account will help us to generate a deeper and more complete understanding and explanation for the limits that particular trade union strategies dealing with globalization pressures face."
Open to all postgraduate students.
Refreshments will be provided.
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
G0.19
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
