Welcome to the fourth special issue of the Pervasive Labour Union zine, Urgent Publishing Debris. In May 2019, the Making Public: Urgent Publishing Conference took place. Among others, it asked the following questions:-"How to realize sustainable, high-quality alternatives within this domain of post-digital publishing?"-"How can designers, developers, artists, writers and publishers intervene in the public debate and counter misinformation in a meaningful and relevant way?"-"What are new publishing strategies for our current media landscape?"-"How to design for urgency without succumbing to an accelerated hype cycle?"The presentations, debates and conversations have all been officially documented in blogposts on the Institute of Network Cultures website, videos and pictures. But what about the notes, the pictures, the recordings and the tweets of the conference's visitors? What do they have to tell us about how each person experienced the conference? This special issue aims to provide new readings of the event by creating remixes of the official archival sources with the 'unofficial' debris circulating around it.In order to facilitate the navigation between articles, making connections visible where they might have only been implicit, the editors have decided to define eleven overarching topics (Social/Community, Activism, Post-truth, New forms, Authorship/Makers, Speed, Positioning, Locality, Relationality, Authoritarianism, Parasite). Each of the topics was attributed a colour and the source material is highlighted accordingly.Furthermore, each remix has a dispersed editors' note, wherein each editor reflects in more detail on the program, how it connects to the conference's topic and how it might answer any of the aforementioned questions.
MULTIFILE
"Despite many efforts, people with a refugee background still have great difficulties to find a job on the Dutch labour market. This has adverse consequences for the economic independence of people with a refugee background, their social connections, personal development, health and general well-being, but also for employers as well as society in general. There are many sectors in the Dutch labour market with large, structural labor shortages, while at the same time much talent remains untapped. Meanwhile, more and more social enterprises in the Netherlands are stepping into this void, with the explicit goal to facilitate access to the labour market for people with a vulnerable position, including people with a refugee background. Consequently, these so-called work integration social enterprises (WISEs) are — by far — the dominant type of social enterprises in the Netherlands. Although the diversity between WISEs in terms of economic sectors, specific target groups and business models is large, the way in which they organize their key activities can serve as an example for regular employers, who still tend to think in problems rather than opportunities when it comes to employing people with a refugee background. At the same time, the impact of these social enterprises still remains relatively limited in comparison to the scale of the societal challenge. The aim of this study therefore is twofold: 1) to obtain a better understanding of the role of WISEs with regard to the sustainable labor participation of refugees, and 2) to assess the ways in which WISEs can scale their societal impact with respect to labour participation of refugees. These conference proceedings focus in particular on (new) forms of collaboration between WISEs and regular employers that aim to become more inclusive employers."
LINK
Key words: labour relations, HRM, social theory, neoliberalism, participation, legitimation, precariatThe aim of this paper is to sketch a social-theoretical framework that can be applied to empirical research on labour market participation, its requirements and legitimation. All projects of the Amsterdam HRM-group deal with problems of the labour market, especially the required competences of the polarized (partly precarious, partly privileged) workforce and changing labour relations. Participation asks, among other things, for a narrative of legitimation which puts individual competences and projects in a broader, meaningful context.The research question is: Which theoretical concepts are necessary to discuss participation in and legitimation of changing labour relations, including the role of HRM? The following concepts will be discussed in their mutual coherence: (1) transitional labour market, (2) precariat as a substitute concept for social class, (3) human capital, differentiated in personal, cultural social, and economic capital as sources of competences, (4) new labour relations – shaped by portfolios of projects of the workforce - in the projective city; (5) economic and societal participation; (6) new labour relations: their flexibility (entrepreneurial individuals), liquidity, contingency, and reflexivity; (7) legitimation: the neoliberal spirit of capitalism; (8) life politics: optional and fragmented versus standard biographies.
The maximum capacity of the road infrastructure is being reached due to the number of vehicles that are being introduced on Dutch roads each day. One of the plausible solutions to tackle congestion could be efficient and effective use of road infrastructure using modern technologies such as cooperative mobility. Cooperative mobility relies majorly on big data that is generated potentially by millions of vehicles that are travelling on the road. But how can this data be generated? Modern vehicles already contain a host of sensors that are required for its operation. This data is typically circulated within an automobile via the CAN bus and can in-principle be shared with the outside world considering the privacy aspects of data sharing. The main problem is, however, the difficulty in interpreting this data. This is mainly because the configuration of this data varies between manufacturers and vehicle models and have not been standardized by the manufacturers. Signals from the CAN bus could be manually reverse engineered, but this process is extremely labour-intensive and time-consuming. In this project we investigate if an intelligent tool or specific test procedures could be developed to extract CAN messages and their composition efficiently irrespective of vehicle brand and type. This would lay the foundations that are required to generate big data-sets from in-vehicle data efficiently.
Agricultural/horticultural products account for 9% of Dutch gross domestic product. Yearly expansion of production involves major challenges concerning labour costs and plant health control. For growers, one of the most urgent problems is pest detection, as pests cause up to 10% harvest loss, while the use of chemicals is increasingly prohibited. For consumers, food safety is increasingly important. A potential solution for both challenges is frequent and automated pest monitoring. Although technological developments such as propeller-based drones and robotic arms are in full swing, these are not suitable for vertical horticulture (e.g. tomatoes, cucumbers). A better solution for less labour intensive pest detection in vertical crop horticulture, is a bio-inspired FW-MAV: Flapping Wings Micro Aerial Vehicle. Within this project we will develop tiny FW-MAVs inspired by insect agility, with high manoeuvrability for close plant inspection, even through leaves without damage. This project focusses on technical design, testing and prototyping of FW-MAV and on autonomous flight through vertically growing crops in greenhouses. The three biggest technical challenges for FW-MAV development are: 1) size, lower flight speed and hovering; 2) Flight time; and 3) Energy efficiency. The greenhouse environment and pest detection functionality pose additional challenges such as autonomous flight, high manoeuvrability, vertical take-off/landing, payload of sensors and other equipment. All of this is a multidisciplinary challenge requiring cross-domain collaboration between several partners, such as growers, biologists, entomologists and engineers with expertise in robotics, mechanics, aerodynamics, electronics, etc. In this project a co-creation based collaboration is established with all stakeholders involved, integrating technical and biological aspects.
Under the umbrella of artistic sustenance, I question the life of materials, subjective value structures, and working conditions underlying exhibition making through three interconnected areas of inquiry: Material Life and Ecological Impact — how to avoid the accumulation of physical materials/storage after exhibitions? I aim to highlight the provenance and afterlife of exhibition materials in my practice, seeking economic and ecological alternatives to traditional practices through sustainable solutions like borrowing, reselling, and alternative storage methods that could transform exhibition material handling and thoughts on material storage and circulation. Value Systems and Economic Conditions —what do we mean when we talk about 'value' in relation to art? By examining the flow of financial value in contemporary art and addressing the subjectivity of worth in art-making and artists' livelihoods, I question traditional notions of sculptural skill while advocating for recognition of conceptual labour. The research considers how artists might be compensated for the elegance of thought rather than just material output. Text as Archive and Speculation— how can text can store, speculate, and circulate the invisible labour and layers of exhibition making? Through titles, material lists, and exhibition texts, I explore writing's potential to uncover latent structures and document invisible labor, considering text both as an archiving method and a tool for speculating about future exhibitions. Using personal practice as a case study, ‘Conditions for Raw Materials’ seeks to question notions of value in contemporary art, develop alternative economic models, and make visible the material, financial, and relational flows within exhibitions. The research will manifest through international exhibitions, a book combining poetic auto-theoretical reflection with exhibition speculation, new teaching formats, and long-term investigations. Following “sticky relations," of intimacy, economy and conditions, each exhibition serves as a case study exploring exhibition making from emotional, ecological, and economic perspectives.
