Warwick Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies is delighted to invite you to Changing Channels-two days of talks and streams on people, work and technofutures,organised in collaboration with The Centre for Digital Inquiry and the Centre for International Methodologies - produced by the Media Lab.

Please find poster and full details below.

Everyone is welcome but places are limited, please arrive early to avoid disappointment.

See(some of) you there!

Wednesday 5th March

13:15-14:15 Sustainable Creative Work - Guy Healy FAB 1.01

Livelihood precariousness – the topic with the most extensive scholarly literature in Creative Industries - remains the most urgent challenge for younger generation filmmakers attempting to find their distinctive voices, and breakout in the post-broadcast era of streaming. Based on his longitudinal interviews with innovative short series makers, this seminar presents a model of sustainable creative labour for filmmakers in the post-broadcast era dominated by YouTube and Netflix. Also foreshadowed are results of the mapping of low-budget, high-cultural impact short series of popular and critical acclaim in Europe, 1998-2025, as presented at U.Warwick’s Venice campus in October, 2024.

Ex-journalist, Dr Guy Healy, is a Marie Curie-Sklodowska Science & Innovation Fellow (Data & Intelligence; Welfare & Inclusion), co-funded by the European Commission and the EUTOPIA alliance of 10 universities under Horizon 2020. While here at Warwick on secondment from Vrije University Brussels Media innovation Unit, he is writing his second book for Routledge (Taylor & Francis), The YouTube Generation and the Diversification of Screenwriting (2026). https://eutopia-university.eu/english-version/sif-post-doctoral-fellowships/sif-3rd-cohort-fellows-guy-healy-vrije-universiteit-brussel

17:00-18:00 Digital Disconnection - Alessandro Gandini FAB 1.16 and online on CDI TV

In this CDI TV episode we will talk about digital disconnection in the post-pandemic setting. While digital technology provided essential connectivity during the pandemic, it also contributed to burnout, social fatigue, and a blurred distinction between personal and professional life. As a result, our relationship with technology has newly come under question and become a new terrain for commodification, with companies selling digital detox programs and mindfulness courses that promise to help individuals restore mental well-being, productivity, and authentic socia

l interactions. The current disconnection trend extends widely, from everyday and mundane practices such as setting time limits on one’s phone, quitting social media, or news avoidance, to broader attempts at disconnecting from work, exemplified by the phenomenon of “quiet quitting” – a workplace trend where employees disengage from excessive work demands, prioritizing well-being over hustle culture. This trend may suggest a broader process of reconfiguration of social structures and structuration in digital societies.

Hosted by Carolina Bandinelli and Michael Dieter.

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.

Thursday 6th March

13:15-14:15 #Neocraft and meaningful work - Alessandro Gandini FAB 1.01

The issue of the meaning of work has become central to 21st century Western societies. It has been argued that a ‘post-employment’ society is affirming, whereby standard, permanent, full-time work loses centrality and increasingly coexists with ‘new forms of work’ that are characterised by original cultures, practices, and organisational forms (Gandini, 2020). Against this backdrop, the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated a growing sense of disaffection from work, as evidenced by phenomena such as the so-called Great Resignation (Gittleman, 2022), which has generated lively discussions, especially – albeit not exclusively – in the US. Within this same timeframe we have seen the revival of original forms of craft work and artisanal production, settled in the context of the postindustrial, digital economy. Epitomised by craft beer brewing (Wallace, 2019; Fox Miller 2019, 2017; Land et al., 2018; Thurnell-Read, 2014), so-called ‘neo-craft’ industries have become epitomous of a post-industrial imaginary that promises ‘a less alienated form of work’ (Land, 2018: np), principled on a primacy of authenticity as a cultural conception of value (Bell et al., 2019). This contribution originates from extensive qualitative research on the lived experiences of neo-craft work conducted in the context of the European Union, consisting in 77 semi-structured interviews with neo-craft workers coupled with ethnographic fieldwork at 17 neo-craft activities across different sectorsbetween 2022 and 2024. Building upon evidence collected within this setting, I argue that the process of resignification that repurposes some labour-intensive and relatively low-income-generating jobs into ‘cool’ work by way of craft (Gandini and Gerosa, 2023) may be eponymous of a larger shift in the cultures and meanings of work, which may be qualified through the term ‘gentrified labour’. Critically, this also creates new inequalities, as it radically transforms entire sectors and geographic areas by displacing other ‘inauthentic’, traditionally working-class occupations – which cannot be associated to authenticity, particularisation or craft – throughout the process (Zukin, 1987).

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.

17:00 -18:00 Reality Engineering After the Techlash - Noortje Marres and Matias Valderrama Barragan FAB 1.16 and online on CDI TV

Join us for a conversation about proliferating efforts to create artificial societies. How artificial are the “societies” we live in today? To what extent is the state and tech industry to blame for the embrace of “social engineering”? What does the “techlash” have to do with it? And how is it that despite widespread criticism of Big Tech, we continue to see an increasing intervention of these companies in our everyday realities? Speakers include Noortje Marres and Matias Valderrama Barragan. Hosted by Carolina Bandinelli and Michael Dieter.

This livestream will be a warm-up to the Artificial Societies symposium to be held on Friday 7 March. If you would like to register for this symposium, co-organised by Warwick's Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies with the Edinburgh Futures Institute, please fill in this form , which is open until 28 February for both online and in-person attendees.

Noortje Marres is Professor in Science, Technology and Society in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. She is a Visiting Professor at the University of Siegen (Germany) affiliated with the Media of Cooperation Research Programme. Her first book, Material Participation : Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics (2012/2015) builds on field research in ecological demonstration homes, and develops an analysis of material forms of engagement. Noortje latest book, Digital Sociology (Polity, 2017) outlines a critical and creative approach to researching digital societies, and argues that the relations between social research and social life are changing in a digital age. She is close to finishing a research project on societal testing of intelligent technologies.

Matias Valderrama Barragan is a third-year ESRC-funded PhD researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodology (University of Warwick). Matias holds an MA and BA in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Matias Master’s thesis, deploys digital methods to map a controversy around a hydroelectric project in the south of Chile. Matias worked on Fondecyt research projects and studies for NGOs on the social implications of multiple digital technologies in Chile, such as environmental sensors, drones, predictive models, and self-tracking devices