Anna-Maria has previously taught at Keele University in the UK and Åbo Akademi University in Finland. She has published on anti-capitalist resistance, anti-consumerism, authenticity, biopolitics, capitalist subjectivation, carbon markets, the city, commodification, the commons, communism, entrepreneurship, experience, late neoliberalism, neoliberal authoritarianism, shopping malls, social movements and utopia.
She was a member of the editorial collective of ephemera: theory and politics in organization (www.ephemerajournal.org) and is currently on the editorial board of Organization: The Critical Journal of Organization, Theory and Society. Her research is grounded in the critique of political economy and draws on critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy and sociology. Her research focuses on commodification, that is, on the many ways in which aspects of life are turned into items for sale and with that into instruments of profit making. It also addresses the way such processes affect subjectivities, the way people think about themselves, their role in society, and their future. Most importantly, she studies how both commodification and this capitalist subjectivation are contested. She is currently writing a book on Cultural Politics of the Commodity.
Selected publications:
Murtola, Anna-Maria (2014) ’Experience, commodification, biopolitics’, Critical Sociology, 40(6): 835-854.
Murtola, Anna-Maria (2012) ‘Materialist theology and anti-capitalist resistance, or, “What would Jesus buy?”’, Organization: The Critical Journal of Organization, Theory and Society, 19(3): 32-51.
Armin Beverungen, Anna-Maria Murtola and Gregory Schwartz (eds) (2013)
‘The Communism of Capital?’, special issue of ephemera: theory and politics in organization, 13(3): 483-700. Also available in print by MayFly Books.
