[ecrea] WIAS Workshop: Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism at the University of Westminister

This workshop marks the publication of the special issue "Academic 
Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism" in tripleC: Communication, 
Capitalism & Critique. We will hear presentations by experts who have 
contributed to the issue: guest editor Thomas Allmer (University of 
Stirling), Karen Gregory (University of Edinburgh) and Jamie Woodcock (LSE).

Modern universities have always been embedded in capitalism in 
political, economic and cultural terms. In 1971, at the culmination of 
the Vietnam War, a young student pointed a question towards Noam 
Chomsky: "How can you, with your very courageous attitude towards the 
war in Vietnam, survive in an institution like MIT, which is known here 
as one of the great war contractors and intellectual makers of this 
war?" Chomsky had to admit that his workplace was a major organisation 
conducting war research, thereby strengthening the political 
contradictions and inequalities in capitalist societies.

Today, universities are positioning themselves as active agents of 
global capital, transforming urban spaces into venues for capital 
accumulation and competing for international student populations for 
profit. Steep tuition fees are paid for precarious futures. 
Increasingly, we see that the value of academic labour is measured in 
capitalist terms and therefore subject to new forms of control, 
surveillance and productivity measures. Situated in this economic and 
political context, the new special issue of tripleC (edited by Thomas 
Allmer and Ergin Bulut) is a collection of critical contributions that 
examine universities, academic labour, digital media and capitalism.


Workshop presentations:

Anger in Academic Twitter: Sharing, Caring, and Getting Mad Online
Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh

Digital Labour in the University: Understanding the Transformations of 
Academic Work in the UK
Jamie Woodcock, LSE

Theorising and Analysing Academic Labour
Thomas Allmer, University of Stirling

The workshop will be chaired by WIAS Director and tripleC co-editor 
Christian Fuchs. WIAS invites everybody interested to attend this 
afternoon of talks and discussions tackling the question of academic 
labour in the age of digital capitalism. A coffee break is provided.

Thomas Allmer is Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of 
Stirling, Scotland, UK, and a member of the Unified Theory of 
Information Research Group, Austria. His publications include Towards a 
Critical Theory of Surveillance in Informational Capitalism (Peter Lang, 
2012) and Critical Theory and Social Media: Between Emancipation and 
Commodification (Routledge, 2015). For more information, see Thomas' 
website.

Karen Gregory is a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of 
Edinburgh, a digital sociologist and ethnographer. She researches the 
relationship between work, technology, and emerging forms of labour, 
exploring the intersection of work and labor, social media use, and 
contemporary spirituality. She is the co-editor of the book Digital 
Sociologies (Policy Press, 2017).

Jamie Woodcock is a fellow at the LSE and author of Working The Phones. 
His current research focuses on digital labour, the sociology of work, 
the gig economy, resistance, and videogames. He has previously worked as 
a postdoc on a research project about videogames, as well as another on 
the crowdsourcing of citizen science. Jamie completed his PhD in 
sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and has held positions at 
Goldsmiths, University of Leeds, University of Manchester, Queen Mary, 
NYU London, and Cass Business School.

Christian Fuchs is Professor at the University of Westminster. He is the 
Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) and 
Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies (WIAS). His fields of 
expertise are critical digital & social media studies, Internet & 
society, political economy of media and communication, information 
society theory, social theory and critical theory. He co-edits the 
open-access journal triple:Communication, Capitalism & Critique with 
Marisol Sandoval.


Register:
http://wias.ac.uk/event/wias-workshop-academic-labour-digital-media-and-capitalism/ 



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