Assoc. Prof. Matko Krce-Ivančić delivered an invited lecture entitled Tourism and the Universal Drama of Work at the international scientific conference Life and Work in Precarious Times, where he presented his original research article of the same title, published in a special issue of the scientific journal Narodna umjetnost dedicated to precarious work. The conference took place on 8 and 9 October 2026 at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (IEF) in Zagreb, as part of the project Precarious Culture and the Future of Work (BURA).
The article is available in open access at the following link:http://https://hrcak.srce.hr/clanak/502348
As stated by the conference organisers: “Our intention is to bring together, through this conference, the insights accumulated by researchers specifically engaged with the phenomena of precarious work and non-standard forms of employment, as well as those of colleagues who contribute to the thematic field of life and work in precarious times from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. At the same time, by engaging with new theoretical developments and empirical research, we seek to critically examine the conceptual framework of existing debates and further develop the concept of precarity.”
More information about the conference, including the programme and the book of abstracts, is available at: https://www.ief.hr/novosti/znanstveni-skup-s-medunarodnim-sudjelovanjem-zivot-i-rad-u-prekarnim-vremenima/
In his lecture, Tourism and the Universal Drama of Work, Assoc. Prof. Krce-Ivančić revisited one of the phenomena explored in Dean MacCannell’s seminal work The Tourist, published almost fifty years ago: the fact that other people’s work has become a tourist attraction. He critically examined MacCannell’s argument that work display enables industrial man to adopt a synthetic social perspective and experience his own role in the universal drama of work. Assoc. Prof. Krce-Ivančić argues that the display of work serves a conservative function, encouraging tourists to consider that they, too, could become part of such a display, not as observers but as poorly paid workers exhibited in the showcase of work.
This demonstrates how the display of work itself reveals precarity as a fundamental feature of the universal drama of work. The research was conducted as part of the AKULTUR research project (CroRIS ID: http://9576; https://www.croris.hr/projekti/projekt/9576), funded by the European Union under the NextGenerationEU programme.