Public Sector Office - Chicago Holiday Party
Hosted by
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ʘ‿ʘWe are joining our colleagues in other cities to host a Public Sector Office Holiday Party, this will be Chicago's first!
Come celebrate/commiserate with your public sector friends and join in on some public sector-themed activities, ugly sweaters encouraged!
(Attendees need not be public sector employees)
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A little about Public Sector Office (PSO):
Ask anyone who works in a government agency if they’ve ever seen a “chair pile” in their office building, and they will probably say yes. No one knows where the pile came from, or what it’s for, but it’s been there for as long as anyone can remember.
Since 2018, the Instagram account @publicsectoroffice has documented everyday scenes of bureaucratic environments from the poignant to the bizarre.
While the account operates, on its surface, as a kind of inside joke among public servants, it also offers rich insights into their lives and the various tensions and challenges that they navigate in the course of their work.
The chair pile, for example, embodies a recurring tension in the public sector between scarcity and surplus. Scarcity exists at all levels of government, from the lack of funding or political will to advance policies and programs, to the constant shortage of essential items like staplers and dish soap. Yet there are moments of remarkable surplus: There is never a shortage of paperwork to be done or regulations by which to abide. As resourcing is subject to the whims of political administrations, public servants may struggle to fund their programs one year, then find themselves suddenly in charge of a hundred-million-dollar budget the next.
@publicsectoroffice prompts us to consider the contemporary stakes of the office not in terms of salvaging real estate values in the Central Business District, but for the work of maintaining a functioning democracy.
Read the entire write-up here:
https://urbanomnibus.net/2023/02/ex-officio/?fbclid=PAAaYys7Vs1NF6u18VrRxM7xsPJemKDVoFaxhT_thNZxKm1BKqZaolB0vwcVk_aem_AYF7iB5moV7jeqFiBWXLgWX63bkDRyHRqjy0JDjpmlze8N4_eFWzCzdIBC5GvwZzkr8
Guest List
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