Friday, January 24 2025, 3 - 4pm MLC 350 Dr. Katherine Sobering Sociology & Women's Studies University of North Texas Personal website In 2001 Argentina experienced a massive economic crisis: businesses went bankrupt, unemployment spiked, and nearly half the population fell below the poverty line. In the midst of the crisis, the iconic twenty-story Hotel Bauen quietly closed its doors. Rather than leaving it vacant, a group of former employees occupied the property and restarted it as a worker cooperative. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, this talk explores the organizational transformation of the Hotel Bauen into the people’s hotel to theorize the organizational production of equality and consider the radical potential of work organizations today. The event is co-sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the Department of Sociology, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute
