Background and Previous Experience
Dario Azzellini is a political scientist (Ph.D. Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, 2010), a sociologist (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Puebla, Mexico, 2012), and a documentary film director. From September 2010 to February 2017, he worked as an assistant professor in Sociology at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and from August 2016 to May 2017, he was a visiting scholar in the Community and Worker Ownership Project at the Murphy Institute, City University of New York.
His strong publication record reflects his specialization in international labor studies and global social change with a special focus on Europe and Latin America. He has done extensive research and has published in the areas of critical labor studies, politics of resistance, Latin American Studies, and war sociology. In the field of critical labor studies, his research has focused on workers’ self-organization and collective responses to precarious work conditions and workplace closure.
From 1999–2000, he was the research director of the Berlin section of the Europe-wide EU research project MORIANA on metropolitan working conditions in times of change. The research project focused on the situation of newly self-employed workers and their strategies against precarization as well as on possible institutional answers.
From 2005 onwards, he studied the transformation and democratization of the administration and ownership of the means of production in Venezuela. He then expanded his research on self-management and workers' control and did field research in Argentina, in Uruguay, and in several European countries that experienced workplace occupations during the current economic crisis.
As an outcome of his research, he published the book Communes and Workers' Control in Venezuela (Brill 2016), edited An Alternative Labour History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy (Zed Books 2015), co-edited Ours to Master and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket 2011) and The Class Strikes Back. Self-Organized Workers’ Struggles in the 21st Century (Brill 2017) and dozens of journal articles and book chapters. He also produced Occupy, Resist, Produce, a series of three documentaries on recuperated factories: RiMaflow (2014) and Officine Zero (2015) in Italy, Vio.Me. (2015) in Greece, and 5 Factories: Workers’ Control in Venezuela (2007). He also launched www.workerscontrol.net, a multilingual website and online archive of workers’ control. WCN is organized as a network of scholars and activists from Argentina, Brazil, France, the UK, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, and the United States.
Out of his engagement in international debates on the commons, Dario Azzellini developed the concept of “Labour as a Commons” (Critical Sociology 2016). See more at www.azzellini.net.
Current Research at ILR
During his stay at the ILR School at Cornell University, he intends to work on his research on workplace recuperations in Europe and on new forms of labor struggles and the cooperation and common practices between labor movements and other social movements in the context of the ongoing crisis.
Dario Azzellini
