publications and articles
Il teatro che da parola. Freak, mostri cyborg e altre narrazioni postumane
Theatre that gives voice. Freaks, monsters, cyborgs and other posthuman narratives
Carmen Pellegrinelli
in Freakery la costruzione del “mostro”/Freakery the construction of the “monster”
a cura di Fabio Bocci e Enrico Valtellina
Minoruty Reports, Cultural Disability Studies 16 2023/I
ISSN: 2465-0315
ISBN: 9788857587721
https://www.mimesisedizioni.it/libro/9791222309651
Abstract
Il contributo propone una riflessione sulla freakery come laboratorio di produzione di narrazioni e controversie capaci di sfidare la concezione umanistica classica su cosa significhi essere umani. Dentro il quadro teorico postumano e neomaterialista, l’articolo riflette in primo luogo sulla relazione tra corpi non conformi e soggettività, attraverso il concetto di differenza come istanza imminente, positiva e dinamica. Inoltre, approfondisce il legame tra soggettività postumane ed espressione, individuando il teatro non-rappresentativo e non-mimetico come l’elemento che ha permesso nei secoli a queste soggettività di produrre narrazioni non conformi. È proprio grazie alla produzione di questi discorsi dentro il dispositivo teatrale, che le soggettività postumane, freak, mostri, cyborg, queer hanno sfidato gli intrappolamenti esistenzialisti e binari della cultura umanistica e antropocentrica tradizionale, contribuendo alla riflessione contemporanea sulle nuove comprensioni dell’umano. Riflessione sempre più necessaria per affrontare le attuali sfide dell’Antropocene.
Keywords: Freakery, disability studies, soggettività postumane, teatro
Alice in Wondertheatre: an Affective Ethnography
Carmen Pellegrinelli & Laura Lucia Parolin
in Cozza M. & Gherardi S., (Eds)
The Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice Theory: Re-imagining Method in Organization Studies and Beyond.
Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3031422751. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-42276-8_6.
Abstract
In March 2020, Bergamo was hit by the first wave of the pandemic. More than 6000 people have died in the area, where the emergency facilities lived in a stressful situation for months. In January 2022, a group of ER doctors and nurses from the Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo (Italy)—the frontline in the crisis—wanted to reflect collectively on their experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. The group set up a one-year-long theatre workshop involving around twenty colleagues from the ER. The workshop was also aimed at preparing a theatre show, “Giorni muti, notti bianche” (Silent days, sleepless nights), presented in the Bergamo’s main theatre. By participating in the theatre workshop, we conducted a collaborative affective ethnography to investigate the dimension of affects in the ER professionals’ work practices during the first wave of the pandemic. This chapter is based on an affective ethnography and it considers the characteristics of this (post)qualitative research method and its potential for organisational scholars.
Keywords: Affective ethnography, Affects, Theatre Workshop, Covid-19, Alice in Wonderland, Intesities.
Posthumanism and sociomaterial organising. The case of Superbergamo’s aid practices during the Covid19 pandemic
Laura Lucia Parolin & Carmen Pellegrinelli
in François-Xavier de Vaujany, Silvia Gherardi, Polyana Silva.
Organization Studies and Posthumanism Towards a More-than-Human World. Routledge. 2024, ISBN 9781032614243.
Abstract
We contribute to the literature on the posthumanist epistemology of practice by analysing the becoming of Superbergamo´s aid practices and their sociomaterial and affective entanglements. To do so, we mobilise a way to consider the entanglement of human and more-than-human elements by using the concept of agencement (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). By showing the agencement in its becoming, our aim is twofold: on the one hand, we illustrate the emergence of new practices and their stabilization in a recognisable organisational entity (Superbergamo); on the other hand, we highlight the processual nature of these practices and their impact on the exceptional situation characterised by fear and restlessness. We will use the concept of territorialization, again from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), to explain the impact of Superbergamo on people living under the first wave of the pandemic.
Keywords: posthumanism, becoming, posthuman epistemology of practice, agencement, sociomaterial and affective entanglements.
Extending Practice-Based Processual Organizational Creativity
Carmen Pellegrinelli
University of Lapland Press (2023)
https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-337-389-1
This thesis addresses the conceptualisation of creativity within organisation studies. It contributes to practice-based processual approaches to organisational creativity (OC), a recent stream of literature that emphasises the temporal progression of activities as the basis of understanding the creative phenomenon from a practice-based perspective. To this end, the thesis explores professional practices in a theatre; an exciting field where the materiality of human and non-human bodies matter, and meanings and contents are negotiated in a complex creation process based on specific professional practices.
The thesis contributes to practice-based processual OC by mobilising the epistemology of practice as a theoretical framework for reconfiguring organisational creativity in practice. The epistemology of practice provides a frame for considering the processual, collective and material dimensions of OC. I show how creativity is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon where knowledge, power, performance and sociomaterial dimensions intersect in practice, to stimulate and produce creative emergence.
To deepen the analysis of the creative practices, I enrich the epistemology of practice with analytical concepts from the perspective of distributed cognition and Actor-Network Theory. In conversation with the epistemology of practice, these traditions deepen the distributed and sociomaterial dimensions of organisational creativity, offering additional tools for a more nuanced analysis of the phenomenon. This suggests going beyond the conceptualisation of creativity as the solving of a problem, and interpreting it instead as variant composition practices where relationships are tested, and chains of mediations are produced that generate innovative outcomes.
This dissertation is organised by way of an introduction and three publications that considered the same empirical case about the production of a theatre show for children, entitled “Ruote Rosa”. The production was written and directed by myself, and the empirical investigations were undertaken as a collaborative ethnography by myself and my co-author for the resultant publications.
Research findings demonstrate how the epistemology of practice, with distributed cognition and creativity, and ANT, expand the knowledge of practice-based processual OC, explaining it as a complex multidimensional phenomenon where different elements meet in practice and give birth to creative emergence. The practical, tacit, sensible professional knowledge of the participants, the power dimension, the sociomateriality and the common orientation of the practice (object of practice), play together and intersect in the creative flow, stimulating and orienting the creative emergence. The thesis documents, and explains, how the dimensions follow each other in a chain of relations that move the process toward something shared and stable; the production of an artifact that, in this case, was a theatre show.
Key words: organisational creativity, practice-based studies, sociomateriality, Actor-Network-THeory, distributed cognition.
The aesthetic dimension of care. : Arts and the pandemic
Carmen Pellegrinelli, Laura Lucia Parolin, Marina Castagna
Organizational Aesthetics, 11(1), 180-198.
https://oa.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/oa/article/view/267
Abstract
Political and ethical dimensions are crucial to the sociomateriality of care. As Puig de la Bellacasa pointed out the “matter of care” confers a solid ethical attachment to the analysis of socio-technical assemblages. However, the new paradigm of care is not only pertinent to political and ethical dimensions, it also embodies an aesthetic dimension that has been insufficiently explored in the extant literature. An aesthetic of care underlines how care produces perceptions and emotions (good or bad) both to those who give, and those who receive care. Analysing an arts festival organised in Bergamo during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, this article shows the potential of an aesthetic of care to disentangle the complex intersections of the political, the ethical and the aesthetic in organised actions. In so doing, we propose to analyse caring as a practice, an open-ended flow of mutual affect that constantly stimulates bodies and senses, and moreover, that an aesthetic of care necessarily consists of sensory ethical practice that implies aesthesis and poiesis.
Keywords: care practices; care ethics; matter of care; bodies; sociomateriality; arts festival; Covid-19; aesthetic practices.
A dynamic view of organizing
An integrative approach
Carmen Pellegrinelli, Laura Lucia Parolin
Book chapter in “Organizational Cognition. The Theory of Social Organizing” by Secchi, Gahrn-Andersen and Cowley S., J.
Routledge.
Abstract
With the analysis of a case of work practice in theatre, the chapter proposes an integrative approach that takes into account insights from distributed cognition and practice-based studies to contribute to the meso-domain of ‘organisational cognition’. While the lesson from distributed cognition focusses on analysing complex socially distributed cognitive activities, practice-based studies, in the tradition of situated learning, brings to the fore the social role of practice and its recurrent actions. Therefore, using a ‘bifocal’ lens provides a fresh look at organizational phenomena such as collective coordination, competent performance, attunement, visualization and improvisation, offering new insights in further exploring organizational cognition.
Key words
Practice-based studies, Theatre, distributed cognition, distributed creativity, situated learning.
Media representation of mutual aid practices: Superbergamo as ‘good news’.
Laura Lucia Parolin, Carmen Pellegrinelli
Critical Discourse Studies
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17405904.2022.2119267
Abstract
During the pandemic, civil society organisations adjusted their purpose to provide support to the most vulnerable. In the midst of the first wave, Superbergamo, an initiative that grew out of local activist associations, provided groceries and medicine to the elderly, the infirm and at-risk groups during the lockdown in Bergamo, Italy. This research analyses a newspaper article from Corriere della Sera published almost two years after the event, which tells the story of Stefano ‘Kino’, one of the volunteers of Superbergamo. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we show how the mainstream media normalised the story of Superbergamo to transform a critical, radical, leftist mutual aid practice, into an example of charitable volunteering. By omitting and recontextualising central elements, the article inscribed the mutual aid practice in a catholic narrative, stripping it of any critical afflatus of the status quo. Reframed within the catholic vocabulary by the Corriere della Sera’s weekly insert ‘good news’, the story of Superbergamo becomes one that reinforces the common sensical model of catholic charitable volunteering.
Key words: Critical discourse analysis (CDA); Superbergamo; mutual aid; charity model; volunteering; catholic hegemony; Gramsci.
Communication technologies and Aid practices: Superbergamo, group chats, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Laura Lucia Parolin, Carmen Pellegrinelli
Qualitative Methods for Studying Groups by Alby, Francesco Arcidiacono, Maria Fernandes-Jesus, Terri Mannarini, Laura Lucia Parolin, Liisa Voutilainen.
Abstract
This article examines “Superbergamo”, a collective which emerged in response to the needs of vulnerable citizens during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bergamo (Italy). The analysis reveals the central role of social media and group chat systems in facilitating the spontaneous creation of the group, and the subsequent developmentof coordinated voluntary emergency activities that brought aid to thousands of local people. Inspired by Actor-Network theory, the analysis traces of the group’s emergence, showing how human and non-human actors—including social media and group chat apps—played a crucial role in shaping the aid practice. In so doing, we contribute to theliterature on emergency responses from the public and social media. More significantly, we show how the critical contribution of technology to the development and sustenance of aid practices can be mapped, by providing evidence of how groups, practices and sociomaterial networks are necessarily entangled.
Post-anthropocentric Rehearsal Studies. A conceptual framework to account for the social and material mediations in performance-making
Carmen Pellegrinelli & Laura Lucia Parolin
Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2021 - Taylor & Francis
https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1979337
Keywords: rehearsal studies, new sociology of art, sociomateriality, mediation, performance-making practices, theatre-making practices, ‘performance yet to arrive’, ethnography
Abstract
This article uses the concept of ‘mediation’ to account for the sociomateriality involved in the rehearsal of a new play. Drawing on ideas from the ‘New Sociology of Art’ that has its origins in Science and Technology Studies, we show how the sociomateriality of the rehearsal is an essential part of the process of theatre-making. It means giving to materials, bodies and matters in the rehearsal room a crucial role in the process of developing and refining a scene. Using ethnographic research methods, with particular emphasis on excerpts from video recordings, we analyse specific activities that take place in the rehearsal room to give a less anthropocentric and a more nuanced reading of the processes that contribute to the creation of a scene. Analysing the dynamics of entanglements in work practices of performance-making, we reveal the material base of the easily overlooked professional processes that constitute the craft of theatre.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14682761.2021.1979337
Unpacking distributed creativity: Analysing sociomaterial practices in theatre artwork
Laura L Parolin, Carmen Pellegrinelli
Culture & Psychology, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X19894936
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354067X19894936
Keywords: distributed creativity, sociomateriality, theatre, rehearsal room, laboratory studies, ‘creative laboratory’
Abstract
This article shows how to account for the sociomaterial dimension of distributed creativity in the arts. By following the genesis of a new theatre production, we examined the sociomaterial practices involved to unpack the sociomaterial dimension of distributed creativity. To account for this, we draw on concepts from laboratory studies to explain creative and design work. In so doing, we considered the significance of distributed creative practices that are constituted by intermediaries which we argue, help to outline, refine and develop the creative idea. This article is especially attentive to the professional practices in the rehearsal room; what we called the ‘creative laboratory’, the locus where material artifact and their potentialities unfold in the process of creating a work of art ‘yet to arrive’. Extracts from ethnographic observations are used to illustrate the creative process from the germination of ideas to the collectively arrived at final production. In this respect, the rehearsal room is where initiatives are trialled and tested, and specific aspects of a scene (re)created, to feed into the composition of the emergent theatrical work.
Where does it come from? Collaborative emergence in creative work practices☆
Laura Lucia Parolin, Carmen Pellegrinelli
New Ideas in Psychology, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2020.100800
Keywords: collaborative emergence, creative network of interactions, collective creative imagination, creative practices
Abstract
This article presents a case in which analytical tools coming from the tradition of distributed cognition are able to account for what has been defined collaborative emergence (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009; Sawyer 2012) in creative practices. With this article, we aim to contribute to the debate of distributed creativity by discussing an empirical case of collaborative emergence and providing the analytical tools able to account for its analysis. Introducing the concept of a creative network of interactions, we stress the importance of selecting, describing, and analysing the interactions that give rise to the collaborative emergence in creative work. Introducing the concept of collective creative imagination, we account for the collective emergence of the scene. We suggest that collaborative emergence is the result of a process of collective coordination and improvisation, emerging from moment-to-moment contingency in collective cognition and imagination. The new unpredictable outcome does not emerge from a sudden singular intuition avulsed from the environment, but it is the result of several coordinated steps made by the participants.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0732118X20300386
“Out of mind”: radici, mappe e percorsi della creatività socio-culturale
Carmen Pellegrinelli
Connessioni – la rivista telematica del Centro Milanese di Terapia della Famiglia
ISSN 2611-4003
Keywords: creatività, cultura, we-paradigm
Abstract
L’articolo offre un quadro generale dello sviluppo del dibattito sul tema della creatività in chiave socio-culturale. Partendo dalla sistematizzazione teorica di Van Peter Glăveanu, il contributo sottolinea la recente svolta che gli studi sulla creatività hanno assunto verso una visione sistemica, contestuale e processuale dei fenomeni creativi. In questa nuova concettualizzazione, la creatività si configura non come un fenomeno individuale di natura mentale, ma come un complesso processo socio-culturale distribuito, mediato da materiali “culturalmente densi”, che porta alla generazione di artefatti nuovi e significativi all’interno di una comunità. L’articolo amplia e discute alcuni dei principali apporti teorici raccolti da Glăveanu con l’obiettivo di mettere in evidenza la convergenza transdisciplinare che negli ultimi vent’anni ha potenziato le basi teoriche della comprensione dei processi creativi in termini socio-culturali.
http://connessioni.cmtf.it/out-of-mind-radici-mappe-e-percorsi-della-creativita-socio-culturale/
Bergamo Resiste. Storia di Superbergamo, solidarietà e attivismo al tempo del Covid
Bergamo Resists. History of Superbergamo, solidarity and activism at the time of Covid
di Carmen Pellegrinelli e Laura Lucia Parolin
Edizioni People, Milano
Keywords: activism, resistance, covid 19, collective action, being connected, affective response, care concept.
Synopsis
During the pandemic, Bergamo sadly rose to the news for its six thousand deaths. The image of military trucks with coffins that the cemetery can no longer bury remains persistent. But there is another piece of history to tell. Because in those days, Bergamo was also a great resistance laboratory. The book tells the story of a group of citizens who, in less than a week, without resources, set up and managed a solidarity network of home deliveries of necessities in the heart of the emergency. Superberbamo was made by a network of nearly 300 people, which has multiplied in a series of solidarity actions on new forms of poverty, non-formal education, support for migrants, support for culture and live performances. This story tells what civil society can do when it decides to unite and act in the name of renewed solidarity for a more just and inclusive society.
