[Air-l] Call for Papers: The Governmediality of Work, Welfare, and the Life Course: Regulating Lives in the Knowledge Society

[Christoph Engemann]

*Call for Papers*

Graduate School of Social Sciences | University of Bremen

*‘The “Governmediality” of Work, Welfare, and the Life Course: 
Regulating Lives in the Knowledge Society’
*

Workshop to be held at the
Hanse Institute for Advanced Study <http://www.h-w-k.de> Delmenhorst, 
Germany
7-8 December 2006


The organizers of the International Workshop ‘Governmediality of Work, 
Welfare, and the Life Course’ invite contributions that investigate the 
relations between life course, social welfare reforms, media 
technologies, and expertise/professionalism.

The Workshop is supported by the Graduate School of Social Sciences and 
will be held at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study (HWK) near 
Bremen, Germany. The HWK will host all participants for the duration of 
the workshop. Some travel funding for international speakers is also 
available.

The political as well as the economic and cultural regimes of governing 
one’s life are currently undergoing profound changes. Corporations, the 
state, and intermediary organizations are employing new modes of 
management that are frequently characterized as decentralized, flexible, 
and knowledge based. The individuals themselves are expected to be 
responsible and enterprising agents of their lives, acting as experts, 
maximizing personal benefits while minimizing their cost to society. 
Under these conditions, both institutions and individuals are required 
to develop new regimes of knowledge about themselves and their 
circumstances. The formation of such knowledge, its distribution and 
application is shaped by two interrelated factors currently 
underestimated in academic discussions: expertise and media.

We propose the term ‘governmediality’ to analyse the media and 
formations of (self-) knowledge and their application in governing the 
social and the self. Currently, a triad of expertise, decentralized 
bureaucracy and new media forms a specific new ‘governmediality,’ whose 
emergence we can observe and which we aim to explore at this workshop.

Experts and professionals such as consultants, coaches, therapists, 
welfare bureaucrats, social workers, and scientists appear wherever 
regimes of flexibilisation and networks emerge. Individuals are expected 
to become experts (of) themselves, while simultaneously a growing number 
of experts problematise lifestyles, reinterpret gendered working and 
caring habits, bear ambiguity, and guide decisions. Experts interpret 
situations and collect information, creating or employing technical and 
moral standards that increasingly aim at what is constructed as ‘life 
itself’. As ‘mediating’ actors, they govern potentially conflictual 
social practices and inequalities by linking social spaces, (social) 
technologies and subjectivities.

The Internet, as the latest development in the history of media, plays a 
crucial role in transforming organizational structures, social 
relationships and regulations of the self. New forms of production and 
representation of knowledge about social groups and individuals are 
available and used by institutions, by social groups, and by individuals 
themselves. The private sector has pioneered Internet-driven 
realignments between individuals and organisations, while the public 
sector only recently has begun to actively embrace these technologies 
under the keyword Electronic Government. In European welfare states, the 
reorganised management of life events like unemployment, education or 
illness is closely tied into E-Government.

The aim of the workshop is to explore the social relations, media 
regimes, and bodies of knowledge that constitute the contemporary 
governmediality of managing individual life courses. We invite both 
empirical and theoretical contributions discussing the following topics, 
among others:

• The ambivalent role and agency of experts/professionals in the 
broadening psycho-social sector and their (re-)construction of gender, 
race, class, and self
• The creation, application and legitimation of norms and standards in 
governing the social and the (enterprising) self
• Current standards and their application in education, work, 
healthcare, and social insurance
• Electronic Government, with special respect to welfare state reforms
• Media regimes and knowledge regimes in education, work, healthcare and 
social insurance
• Contemporary social theory, sociology of knowledge, and media theory – 
conceptual challenges and opportunities for the application of media 
theory to social thought and sociology


We welcome submissions (2-page abstract and a CV) to:

Christoph Engemann
engemann at gsss.uni-bremen.de

Boris Traue
traue at kgw.tu-berlin.de


Please submit your proposals no later than September 20.
Pre- and postdoctoral researchers are especially encouraged to contribute.

The Graduate School of Social Sciences <http://www.gsss.uni-bremen.de/> 
(GSSS) was founded in 2002 by the top-ranked sociology and political 
science departments at the University of Bremen. The GSSS offers 
interdisciplinary doctoral education in an international environment.

The Hanse Institute for Advanced Study <http://www.h-w-k.de> (HWK) was 
founded in 1995 and supports the disciplinary and interdisciplinary 
collaboration of outstanding national and international researchers, 
offering the opportunity to concentrate on chosen research projects and 
to absorb ideas and inspirations from other disciplines and differing 
national traditions of science and scholarship.


-- 
Christoph Engemann, Dipl. Psych.
Graduate School of Social Sciences
University of Bremen
Postfach 330 440
28334 Bremen/Germany
Telephone: ++049 179 1233 933
engemann at gsss.uni-bremen.de
www.gsss.uni-bremen.de
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/engemann/