[ecrea] Log Out! Resistance Within and Against Platform Labour - Call for participants

Log Out! Resistance Within and Against Platform Labour

Call for participants to an international symposium, McLuhan Centre for 
Culture and Technology, University of Toronto, March 6, 2018.

http://www.chi.utoronto.ca/logout/

The McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of 
Toronto invites participants to an international symposium that will 
address forms of resistance within and against platform labour.

An emerging wave of struggles in sectors such as logistics, food 
delivery, journalism, and other platform-based sites of labour has shown 
how workers resist the casualized and precarious work conditions of the 
digital economy. Workers at app-based companies such as Uber or 
Deliveroo are hired as independent contractors and controlled through 
mobile apps. E-commerce corporations such as Amazon and H&M use 
logistics algorithms and digital technologies to speed up work in their 
warehouses. Web designers and media workers are increasingly employed as 
freelancers through platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr. Journalists and 
social media managers co-operate on and are monitored through Slack.

In these settings, algorithmic power is coupled with the material 
command over workers’ bodies, time and space. Yet while technology is 
used to intensify and subdue labour, it is also constantly met with 
resistance from workers. Think of the Fordist assembly line or the 
Taylorist numerical control machine and the cycles of struggles they 
generated. If the platform and the app may be today’s core technologies 
to organize and intensify work, only recently research in media and 
technology studies has started to focus on workers in the digital 
economy as active subjects that challenge the patterns shaped by the 
platform as they unionize or organize for improved conditions, higher 
wages, predictable scheduling, and better benefits. Indeed scholarship 
on digital labour tends to overlook the key role of worker refusal, 
organizing and struggle in future processes of liberation.

The symposium will focus on the role of digital technologies in 
re-organizing labour processes and forms of worker resistance. We are 
interested in empirical and theoretical contributions that address 
worker organizing and unionization, strikes, work refusal, algorithm 
hacking, tactical interventions, as well as the material and political 
economic components of resistance to platform-based labour. Both 
academic and activist critical perspectives on platform labour and 
politics are welcome.

The symposium is funded by the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology 
and organized by its working group on platform labour. It is 
co-sponsored by the ICCIT (Institute for Communication, Culture, 
Information and Technology) and the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Confirmed speakers include:
Nick Dyer-Witheford, Western University
Kristy Milland, McMaster University and TurkerNation
Alex Rosenblat, Data & Society
Jamie Woodcock, London School of Economics

Please send an extended abstract in English (750 words) as well as a 
short biography (200 words) to Alessandro Delfanti at 
(a.delfanti /at/ utoronto.ca) by October 27, 2017.

The results of the selection will be announced by November 15. The 
symposium is planned for March 6, 2018. Funding for travel and 
accommodation will be available for accepted speakers. Selected papers 
are invited to be published in a special issue for a media studies or 
technology studies peer-reviewed journal (to be announced).




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