Re-spatializing digital labor
Below, I’ve pasted a call for papers for the 2021 AAG meeting. The session will be synergistic with a paper I’m currently writing (see the working paper version here), and is basically trying to home in on how space is operationalized within digital labor studies. At the most basic level, I argue that inattention to space within digital labor studies has obscured the relational geographies and attentional economies that characterize a plethora of digital laboring practices. By thinking relationally about digital labor, we’re able to better see how multiple overlapping spaces not limited to Euclidean geometries impact who does what sort of work and with what consequences. I hope to see you there, even if just virtually!
Re-spatializing Digital Labor
Organizers: Ryan Burns and Luke Bergmann
Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Seattle, WA, April 7-11, 2021
It is now an urgent moment for geographers to revisit how we think of the spaces of digital labor. By now, the platforms mediating and organizing work are well-known, and their implications increasingly theorized. UberEats, Lyft, Didi Chuxing, and Fiverr scaffold the gig economy wherein workers perform ad hoc jobs delegated through the platform; Yelp, Amazon, Baidu, and OpenStreetMap coordinate volunteered data production; and tech workers for major corporations like Google, Apple, Tesla, and Alibaba reshape regional political-economies. The geographies of this digital labor are critical to understanding its social, political, and economic implications, but scholars have primarily made sense of its geographies by engaging narrow conceptions of “space” and “labor” that obscure important relations and processes. Digital labor is often understood to occur within Euclidean geometries, under the premise of remuneration, and through Marxian conceptions of value. At the same time, digital labor discussions often under-theorize immaterial and affective labor, attentional economies, and moral economies. A more planetary view of digital labour would further draw out its uneven geographies – with geopolitical implications – and emphasize new empirical imperatives such as diversifying case studies or mobilizing comparative approaches. In short, broadening the purview of what digital labor is and where it happens can challenge some of the conceptual framings that have driven digital labor studies to date.
This session seeks to rethink the spatial frameworks through which geographers grasp work conducted in and through the digital. In turn, we hope to reclaim many forms of (digital) work whose spatialities have occluded them from our attention. We welcome interdisciplinary submissions from scholars looking broadly at the intersections of space, labor, and the digital, and their combined social, political, and economic implications. Themes of submissions could relate, but not be limited, to:
-Relational, representational, networked, hybrid, or topological spaces of digital labor
-Immaterial digital labor of affects, emotions, and “experiences”
-Spaces of/in/for/through digital social reproduction
-(Re)visualizing non-Euclidean geometries of digital labor
-Moral economies producing spaces for digital labor and its commodification
-Attentional economies and their spatialities, political-economies, and epistemological framings
-Automation of digital labor: its spatial technologies, socio-political technologies, and the digital-material spaces for their manifestations
-Valorized practices of non-work, like games, CAPTCHA, information search, play, and communication
-Using digital labor to question static regional-geographic categories like “Global South” and “territory”
To be considered for inclusion in this session, please email your abstract of 250 words to ryan.burns1@ucalgary.ca and luke.bergmann@ubc.ca by October 19, 2020. Please note that the deadline for registering and submitting your abstract in the AAG system is October 29th, 2020.