I am a social and communication researcher, teacher, and PhD candidate (ABD) in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada.

My current research has me working with and investigating Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises, or ERT). Using a combination of extended interviews, ethnographic observation techniques, case study analysis, and historical documentary research, I am learning first-hand about how social transformation and social production are being shaped and technologically-mediated in the present by ERT protagonists. Involved in locally-situated and democratically-rooted expressions of social production, the Argentine ERT phenomenon has many affinities with other ERT experiments throughout Latin America. It is also rooted in the long tradition of labour struggles in Argentina, the worker coop movement, Argentina’s neighbourhood assemblies, experiments with alternative forms of communal support, mutual aid practices, and the horizontal politics of numerous social movements throughout the country.

I believe that engaging with the lived experiences of Argentina's ERT protagonists can not only assist the struggle for more equitable and self-determined working life in Argentina, but perhaps inspire other similar workers’ movements and initiatives around the world. It can also advance and update critical theories of technology; projects rooted in democratic uses of technology; and the theories and practices of workers’ control, self-management, workspace democracy, and socialized production more broadly.

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Since, 2005, my research and work with the worker-recuperated enterprises has taken me to different ERTs in various economic sectors throughout Argentina. In addition, I have helped organize two conferences on self-management and the workers’ economy: the First International Gathering of the Workers’ Economy: Self-Management and the Distribution of Wealth in July of 2007, and the Second International Gathering of the Workers’ Economy: Work and Self-Management in Times of Global Crisis (August 12-15, 2009). I have also been publishing articles on the ERTs in journals and magazines (e.g., Labour Studies, New Socialist) and also in book chapters, such as a chapter I co-wrote with Andrés Ruggeri in JJ McMurtry and Daryl Reed’s co-edited book Co-Operatives in a Global Economy: The Challenges of Co-Operation Across Borders.

I have also been collaborating extensively with a team of anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists doing work with and research on the ERTs at the Open University program out of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires and the Center for Advanced Studies at the National University of Córdoba. In August of 2009, the Open University program team (who also run the ERT Documentation Center out of the worker-recuperated graphics shop Chilavert) came out with a new, collaboratively written book on the ERT phenomenon in Argentina and Latin America entitled Las empresas recuperadas: Autogestón obrera en Argentina y América Latina (The Recuperated Enterprises: Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina in Latin America), published by the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (UBA) press. I have two chapters in this book, one on the the ERTs as workers’ coops and the other on the social innovations of ERTs.

I have also engaged in many educational activities in Argentina, Canada, and the US (see the “teaching” section of this site).

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Go here for a brief abstract of my research objectives and methods.

Go here for a detailed outline of my PhD research project.