Ephemera events archive

ephemera’s response to the coronavirus crisis

Throughout its 20 years’ existence, ephemera’s purpose as a journal has been to critically engage with the theory and politics of organization. In the face of the current re-organization of public and private life on an unprecedented scale, ephemera’s editorial collective has decided to slow down the processes of running a journal. This means that the publication of issue 20.2 (May 2020) will be suspended and future issues will be postponed by 3 months.

Crawling from the wreckage: Does critique have a future in the business school?

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Survival itself has something nonsensical about it today, like dreams in which, having experienced the end of the world, one afterwards crawls from the basement.

T.W. Adorno, Minimal Moralia.

Critique is always a critique of some instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution, and it loses its character the moment in which it is abstracted from its operation and made to stand alone as a purely generalizable practice. 

Judith Butler, What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue.

Beyond measure

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Measurement is a central task of capitalist organization. From the days of the industrial factory, when labour first came to be measured in hours, through to the time-motion studies under Taylorist regimes, measurement has involved the optimization of surplus value extraction from labour. During the 20th century, these techniques of measurement were complemented by more intrusive forms of quantification such as the use of psychological testing in the human relations school.

 

Speaking truth to power? Theorizing whistleblowing

This workshop explores the relation between whistleblowing and forms of organizational power, and with critique. With the shocking revelations of Snowden and Wikileaks, and news of Manning’s mistreatment in custody, whistleblowing is a ‘hot topic’ in news debates. Even so, public perceptions of whistleblowers are rife with ambivalence; for some they represent ‘traitorous violators’ of a code of fidelity to their organization, suspicious figures who reject their obligations of loyalty to the employer, and dangerous tellers of secrets.

The disjointedness of time: Ghostly matters in organization

This ephemera workshop aims to discuss how the study of ghosts and ghostly matters in organizations can contribute to an understanding of what organization and organizing is. It will explore the disorderly, the unexplainable, the uncanny qualities of organizational life and attends to all the different sorts of ‘absent-presences’ that haunt, disrupt, distort, trouble, and bother the smooth functioning of work life. Additionally, it aims to learn about fissures between shiny futures and inadequate pasts and entanglements of hopes and fears in organizational life.

Whither emergence?

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Conference organizers: Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Konstantin Stoborod and Keti Chukhrov at NCCA Moscow, Russia, 6-7 May 2015

The very first ephemera conference, ‘Web of capturing the moving mind’, which took place on a Trans-Siberian train, had Moscow as its starting point. 10 years later, ephemera is happy to announce it is going back to Moscow, so as to make our minds move again and cross all sorts of boundaries that constitute us and the worlds we inhabit.