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Space has never merely served as a backdrop for work—it has structured, enabled, and constrained the very possibility. By taking a socio-cultural approach to work and its spatial dimension, the seminar seeks to address the spatial organization of work, its recent changes and implications for how we understand work and its organization. The Industrial Revolution extracted work from the home and relocated it to the factory and (bureaucratic) office, which inaugurated new spatial regimes and spatial technologies that displined bodies, regulated time, maximized efficiency and organized hierarchies. With the rise of the knowledge economy, digital technologies, and networked communication, work and its spatial infrastructure is again transforming. Mobile devices, laptops, and cloud-based platforms work have become somewhat ubiquitous by transgressing previous spatial boundaries—into homes, cafés, airports, and public spaces. New work paradigms like hybrid work, mobile work, and work from anywhere exemplify this spatial decentering of work
The seminar seeks to investigate how work is intertwined with space and how the contemporary spacing of work produces, incites and informs complex new organizational forms, alters (traditional) work relations, and forsters socio-cultural questions on how to understand and (spatially) organize it in contemporary society. For one, the emergence of remote and home-based work challenges previous boundaries between professional and personal space and make these work spaces become contested affective, organizational, and political terrains. Simultaneously, the spacing of work raises questions about who actually gets to be spatially flexible. While some workers benefit from spatial autonomy and may be able to work from anywhere, others still have to remain spatially fixated. Thus, new work spaces and the spacing of work may also mask new forms of inequality, surveillance, and exclusion. Inquiring contemporary work spaces, means studying how they are performed and practiced in everyday interactions, whereby articulating the configuration of social realities, power relations and lived (affective) experiences. How does the spacing of work e.g. impact and alter our understanding of ‘professionalism’, our affective involvement, work-life balance etc.? What does differences across sectors and organizations alter our conceptions of work and working culture? How does the spacing of work become political? How does the legal infrastructure of work resonate with the spacing of work (working hours, worker rights, safety, ‘anywhereness’ etc.)? Overall the seminar is dedicated to both understanding and exploring the current developments of work and its spatial organization. Its aim is to, conceptually and methodologically, equip students with a basic understanding of work and its relation to space as first and foremost an organizational aspect that is manifested through everyday practices and spatial arrangements, yet raises cultural and political questions on, and to, contemporary society.

On successful completion of the course, students should be able to:
- Understanding the notions of work, space and spacing work as well as the relation in configuring contemporary organization, society and culture.
- Applying and experimenting with performative (ethnographic) methods of exploring work, space and their organization
- Documenting, discussing and analyzing empirical findings
- Relating empirical findings to concepts and critically reflect on socio-cultural implications

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