Digital administrative systems are ubiquitous in modern bureaucracies, part of the ‘everyday’ that oftengoes unnoticed and creates the digital undertow. Based on an ethnographic study of a social services officein Sweden, we show how these digital systems can be understood as digital non-places, which appear asfixed and immobile to workers. This appearance masks the inherent precarity and fluidity of space that isoften perceived to characterize digital spaces. By analysing the architecture, experience and social practicesof a bureaucratic digital space, we show how it creates a barren, fixed world, where others are absent orreduced to ‘documentary persons’. Because the space does not allow for placemaking, in terms of physicaltransformation or social engagement, workers cannot transform it into a place, which would provide a senseof belonging. It is this lack of belonging, rather than a lack of meaning, that creates the non-place. Moreover,the barrenness and reduction in personhood provided by the digital non-place may nudge workers towardsa ‘social production of indifference’ in the exercise of public authority. The study highlights how a place-sensitive approach can illuminate our understanding of modern workspaces, and the effects they may haveon workers.

This paper explores the significance of meeting architecture, inviting us to consider what sociopolitical possibilities are made and foreclosed by the ways distinct meeting forms circulate bodies and faces. The goal of the grassroots organization Massachusetts Against Solitary Confinement (MASC) is to end solitary confinement – a form of carceral torture – in prisons and jails throughout the state. Long-term political and pedagogical engagement with MASC staff and the survivors of solitary confinement who comprise MASC's base reveals that the zoomiverse shift of 2020-2021 had several divergent effects on the organization's work. The zoomiverse facilitated expansion of MASC's relational solidarities, enabling MASC to engage meaningfully with national and international networks engaged in similar struggles for policy change. It also enabled new strategies for elevating survivors' voices in policy and elite-run advocacy meetings. But the zoomiverse also undermined the power and efficacy of this strategy. For potential allies outside of the survivor community, hearing the stories of survivors of state torture entails profound bodily discomfort, which we suggest is itself psychically transformative. The accordion architecture of zoomiverse meetings enables participants to easily dissociate from discomfort, to evade what we call "affective disconcertment." Such evasion seems to inhibit the transformation of consciousness of potential allies that is necessary to change policy.

Meetings are our most ubiquitous form of everyday collective human engagement. The pandemic lockdowns shifted the taken-for-granted architecture of meetings across many contexts around the world, from the presumptive in-person meeting with bodies in a single space to the presumed virtual meeting with many faces, on many screens, in many physical spaces and time zones. What did this “zoomiverse” shift mean for our ways of making organization, making relationships, and making change? This paper explores the significance of meeting architecture, with a focus on what socio-political possibilities are made and foreclosed by distinct circulations of bodies and faces. What do meetings in the zoomiverse make? What is the significance of the zoomiverse? And what happens now, in what we call the meeting pluriverse, where organizers, workers, and activists must choose, perpetually, from among a seemingly infinite set of virtual, hybrid, and in-person architectures? Here is where meeting ethnography can be helpful.

The policy word collaboration is a political buzzword omnipresent within human service organisations in Sweden and other countries. Collaboration stands for services working together toward a common goal. It is understood as the solution for a multitude of problems, putting the client at the centre and involving the services needed for making them financially self-sufficient. Public service collaboration assumes gaps between entities, whether they are organisations or professionals holding a particular kind of knowledge or available resources. Gaps are seen as omissions and pitfalls in activities which should be removed. My thesis is that putting the gap at the centre reveals not only the disjuncture of the gaps but also the productiveness of the gap in collaborative projects between organisations. The article demonstrates how documents and meetings work both as makers and blenders of gaps between social services and jobcentres. If gaps are productive spaces, what does it denote for collaboration between organisations? The article is placed ethnographically in documents and meetings set to enable collaboration between social workers and job coaches. I will focus on the gap, the space between documents and organisations, as productive spaces in collaborative projects.

Fast Childcare in Public Preschools presents an ethnographic examination of the implementation of fast-policy management models and the efforts of teachers to use these to improve their work organization, and the frictions this brings. Using examples from Swedish public preschools, the book focuses on essential areas of the Lean management model in particular, bringing to life concepts relating to the care and education of children. The book draws on international childcare policy and public reforms, exploring the assignments that preschools are set and argues that separating the pedagogical and the organizational as suggested by proponents of management models is not possible.

This book considers Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore’s work on ‘fast policy’ and ‘model power’ and analyzes the tensions between the easy-to-use and difficult-to-use in management models. The model form of Lean’s management model rendered it difficult to align with existing childcare policy, pedagogical models, and the organization of a preschool. The book explores the utopian dimension of a modern project in pursuit of efficiency and speed in relation to the Lean model and the preschool teachers’ work, by asking, ‘what are the wider societal implications of the Lean project in preschools?’

Fast Childcare in Public Preschools will be of great interest to cultural anthropologists, qualitative sociologists and political scientists, and organizational researchers interested in the anthropology of policy.