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[ecrea] Log Out! Resistance Within and Against Platform Labour - Call for participants
Tue Sep 26 22:11:10 GMT 2017
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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