Workshop: Anthropology of bureaucracy and public services

We invite all post-docs, PhD students and advanced MA students interested in anthropology of state, bureaucracy, politics/policies and public services for a workshop "Anthropology of bureaucracy and public services" organized by Prof. Thomas Bierschenk (University of Mainz).

The workshop is free of charge for participants thanks to Ministry of Science and Higher Education funding.

Date: Friday 22. February: 15:00 to 19:00, Saturday 23. February: 9:00 to 17:00
Venue: Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Żurawia 4, room 108
Application deadline: 11 February 2019

Bureaucracies are specific type of organization dominated by the bureaucratic control mechanism. They can be found in the public sector (e.g. public administration in a large sense), where they partake in the sovereignty claim of the state. They are also found as well as in the private sector (e.g. in large companies, but also in large non-governmental organizations). Bureaucracy is one of the most important 'traveling blueprints' that shape the contemporary world. Like other organizations, bureaucracies are marked by a tension of formal and informal rules. This gives ethnography its pre-eminent role, as it is the only methodology by which informal practices can be accessed.

This is a combined workshop where in the first part we will discuss some selected seminal literature on the seminar topic and in the second part we will discuss papers by participants.

Those participants who want their papers to be discussed are requested to send them to the other participants not later than 11 February, via the following Email: j.szymanska@etnograficzna.pl
Upon reception of these papers, the final programme of the seminar/workshop will be established and sent to the participants.

Participants are requested to read, before the beginning of the seminar, the papers by other participants, as well as the other seminar literature.

Depending on the interests of participants, the seminar will deal with the following topics, among others:

• Formal norms and informal practices
• The relationship between the written and the oral
• Material aspects of bureaucracy
• Bureaucracy and emotions
• Methodological problems of ethnographic research of bureaucracies (access, participatory observation, interviews, creation of respect, interdisciplinarity, teamwork)
• Feedbacks between basic and applied research, and between analysis and intervention
• Recent reforms of the bureaucracy: New Public Management

Participants of the workshop are encouraged to attend the lecture by Prof. Bierschenk on the ethnography of public bureaucracies on 20 February,10:30 at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, room 108.

Please register for the workshop via the following link before 11 February: https://goo.gl/forms/TPSQJYeHn4rM0LHz2

Thomas Bierschenk is professor of anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (Germany). He has studied public services in Africa, and is the co-editor of ‘States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies” (Brill, Leiden 2014), and is now conducting a research project on the management of cultural difference by German police.

Antropologia dziś - otwarte seminaria naukowe – zadanie finansowane w ramach umowy 973/P-DUN/2018 ze środków Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego przeznaczonych na działalność upowszechniającą naukę. Projekt jest realizowany przez Stowarzyszenie Pracownia Etnograficzna im. Witolda Dynowskiego we współpracy z Instytutem Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej UW.