A series of fortunate events brought us together to work on this
book. Before this joint work, we were working on quite different
(but, we would come to learn, theoretically related) projects.
Katie had been conducting an ethnography of “equality projects”
in Hotel Bauen, a worker- run, worker- recuperated business in central
Buenos Aires. For years, Katie was immersed in the organizational
life of this hotel that had been closed by its private owners,
occupied by its workers, and restarted as a worker cooperative.
While much of her fieldwork focused on reorganization of service
under worker control, she also observed the cooperative’s longterm
political campaign to legalize its use of the downtown hotel.
Summer after summer, she documented the actions of myriad state
actors— from building inspectors and ministry staffers to judges,
city council members, and national senators— who promised very
different futures. While some advocated for the hotel to be expropriated
by the state (which would secure its tenancy), others
threatened closure, eviction, and the almost certain dissolution of
the cooperative. As state agents simultaneously proffered hope and
fear, members of the cooperative were left in a legal limbo that is
still unresolved at the time of this writing.