Abstract of my PhD research project's objectives and methods

In particular, I am applying participant/action research and phenomenology to explore the interplay between technologies of work (i.e., the modes of production), grassroots socio-political organization, and the democratic uses of those technologies within the ERT movement. In order to learn directly from this promising grassroots movement of workers I have been going to Argentina (the country of my birth) regularly over the past few years in order to see first hand how it is that ERT protagonists root their everyday work and their socialized production practices in the concept of autogestión (self-management). I am also interested in better understanding the praxical ways these workers are democratizing their technologies of (re)production, or, alternatively, challenged by their relations with these technologies. Moreover, my project is also a political economic one: I am deeply interested, on a macrosociological and macroeconomic level, in better understanding why this phenomenon happened in Argentina. What made the recent Argentine political economic conjuncture ripe for this type of self-managed workers’ cooperative to to emerge? What socio-cultural, socio-economic, and socio-political aspects of its past labour and worker struggles have helped shape the emergence of almost 200 ERTs since the late 1990s?