[Commlist] CFP - Log Out! 2: Workers Confronting Digital Capitalism, International Conference, Toronto

Call for papers
Log Out! 2: Workers Confronting Digital Capitalism
International Conference, Toronto
March 13, 2020

https://www.mcluhancentre.ca/logout

SUBMIT: An extended abstract in English (500 words) and short biography 
(max 200 words)
CONTACT: Julie Yujie Chen at (julieyj.chen /at/ utoronto.ca)
DEADLINE: November 29, 2019

Digital capitalism is a terrain of intensifying social conflict. Work is 
increasingly shaped by technologies such as platforms and algorithmic 
systems, which standardize and reorganize the labour process, 
incorporate managerial tasks, and devise new forms of value generation. 
By decomposing or outsourcing jobs, technologies are being used to make 
workers increasingly replaceable. New surveillance techniques are used 
to control and discipline workers, and new forms of despotism in the 
digital workplace are on the rise. But workers don’t passively obey the 
rules of the digital economy. In recent years, repertoires of tactics 
inherited from the industrial era have been revived, adapted, and 
extended by digital workers to fuel new struggles in the contemporary 
economy. Look no further than drivers in the ride-hailing industry in 
the streets of the world, domestic workers and freelancers in North 
America and Asia, food-delivery couriers in Europe and Canada, warehouse 
workers in urban peripheries across the globe, software engineers from 
China to California, and game designers and other digital media workers 
in cities across North America.

The ubiquitous penetration of digital technologies in warehouses, 
workshops, offices, and app-based workplaces is met with novel 
workarounds and solidarity-building techniques. Both overt organizing 
and covert resistance connect workers in traditional sectors like 
hospitality as well as in booming industries such as logistics, online 
crowdwork, or the urban gig economy. Scholars from multiple disciplines 
and labour activists have started to shape the debate around digital 
worker struggle, but questions remain: What are the new challenges and 
potentials brought about by the new wave of autonomous decision-making 
technologies? Which new forms of class composition boost solidarity and 
organizing in the digitally-mediated work environment? What roles do 
technologies, cultures, geographies, and infrastructures play in worker 
organizations? How can tactical media be deployed towards workers’ 
goals? How do workers log out from or subvert digital labour?

Building on the success of the 2018 edition, Log Out! 2 brings together 
critical research on how workers from different sectors of digital 
capitalism across the world confront, negotiate, and disrupt the 
technologically-mediated conditions of work that structure and mediate 
their lives. We are interested in both 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. Worker 
knowledge is critical to understanding labour politics: we welcome 
contributions from members of worker collectives and labour unions.

Log Out! 2 is funded by the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology 
and organized by the McLuhan Centre working group on digital labour. It 
will take place at the University of Toronto on March 13, 2020.

Confirmed speakers include Jack Linchuan Qiu (The Chinese University of 
Hong Kong) and Sareeta Amrute (University of Washington and Data & 
Society). The conference will also host a roundtable of worker-led 
organizations, including Foodsters United, Game Workers Unite!, VICE 
Canada Union, and more to be confirmed.

​Results will be announced in mid-December 2019. Limited funding for 
travel and accommodation will be made available for selected speakers, 
with a preference for students, workers, independent or precarious 
scholars, and speakers from the Global South. In your application please 
indicate if you need financial support.

The organizing committee for Log Out! 2 is composed of Julie Yujie Chen, 
Nicole Cohen, Alessandro Delfanti, Greig de Peuter, Julian Posada, 
Brendan Smith.

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