126. sociologický večer
Householding.xlsx, or calculating and moralizing domestic life through home-made spreadsheets
host: Mateusz Halawa (Max Planck Partner Group for the Sociology of Economic Life at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences)
authors: Mateusz Halawa and Marta Olcoń-Kubicka
In the era of financialization and digitization, how are domestic intimacies transformed by technology? Based on ethnographic fieldwork among young heterosexual middle-class couples living together in Warsaw and its suburbs, this lecture will explore the role of their home-made accounting and budgeting spreadsheets in the manufacture of domestic economic life. We argue that such digital forms actively intervene in the representation, constitution, shaping,and performing of their respective households as calculative agencies and moral domains. We present and analyse a case study of five couples householding with software, and based on that analysis call for an extension of the current interest in the generative role of financial devices from markets to households.
Mateusz Halawa (the presenting author) is a researcher at the Max Planck Partner Group for the Sociology of Economic Life at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences w. He serves as the head of social sciences and humanities at the School of Form, an undergraduate design program in Poznań. He is a PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research in New York.
The event is supported by The Czech Academy of Sciences under Strategy AV21: Top Research in Public Interest.