This talk is co-hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities and the Digital Future Institute’s Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London.

In recent years, a new set of jobs has affirmed as innovative carriers of meaningfulness. Jobs that have traditionally been considered working-class, or low-status, have been ‘resignified’ into status-inducing occupations by way of their ‘artisanalization’ and the infusion of craft principles within them. Craft beer brewers and bakers, artisanal gin distillers and textile producers: these are only a few among a new breed of workers who are pursuing alternatives to the 20th century ideal of middle-class employment, escaping the ‘bullshit jobs’ of the corporate and knowledge economy to engage in practices that combine the search for resonance with one’s work, with the necessity of income generation.

Based on theoretical and empirical research conducted within the CRAFTWORK project, a large-scale, multi-method study of ‘neo-craft’ work and the new artisanal economies in the European Union, financed by ERC Starting Grants 2020 (European Research Council – Horizon Europe – see here), the talk questions the emergence of so-called ‘neo-craft’ work and explores its contradictions. On the one hand, a return to a notion of ‘work as craft’ is affirming, which newly emphasizes work meaningfulness and hints at the demise of traditional hierarchical categorizations of occupational roles. On the other hand, the cultural imaginary of work is being reshaped through digital platforms, both visually and discursively. ‘Neo-craft’ jobs become status-inducing as social media contribute to the reproduction of this allure of meaningfulness, reproducing narrations that romanticise the possibility to ‘live well’ doing something meaningful – even if this entails earning less, or working labour-intensive jobs for longer hours.

Speaker info:

Alessandro Gandini (PhD, University of Milano) is an Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan. His research focuses on the relationship between technology and society from a cultural perspective, looking at platformisation processes, digital labour, digital cultures and methods. He is the Principal Investigator of the CRAFTWORK project (2021-2025), funded by ERC Starting Grants, and the Scientific Coordinator of Algocount (www.algocount.org), which focuses on the critical study of algorithms.