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SUMMARY:Fully remote: scenes of detachment in worlds of work - David Bisse
 ll (University of Melbourne)
DTSTART:20250507T150000Z
DTEND:20250507T163000Z
UID:TALK231757@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Laszlo Cseke
DESCRIPTION:This paper develops a cultural geographical account of detachm
 ent in response to longstanding theoretical engagements with attachment in
  human geography. While theories of habit\, care ethics\, and performativi
 ty have each emphasised how socio-spatial attachments form and persist\, m
 uch less attention has been paid to how detachment occurs. We take up this
  question by developing the concept of a ‘scene of detachment’\, build
 ing on Anderson’s (2023) spatial-phenomenological theorisation of attach
 ment. Our empirical focus is on a specific socio-spatial transformation in
 tensified by the Covid-19 pandemic: the shift to fully-remote work amongst
  knowledge workers. Drawing on interviews with managers and employees in A
 ustralia conducted between 2022 and 2024\, we analyse how concerns around 
 worker detachment surfaced as organisational anxieties tied to value produ
 ction and affective investment in the workplace. In doing so\, we expand t
 he concept of a ‘scene of detachment’ to account for the subtle\, part
 ial\, and affectively complex ways that detachment is lived and laboured t
 hrough. Rather than aligning with more totalising calls for detachment oft
 en found in post-work Marxist theory\, we foreground how these situated de
 tachments reveal the mutability of attachments to work—cracks in dominan
 t narratives that gesture toward new\, politically hopeful horizons of pos
 sibility.
LOCATION:Small Lecture Theatre\, Department of Geography
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