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- Convenors:
-
Philipp Budka
(University of Vienna)
Elisabetta Costa (University of Antwerp)
Sahana Udupa (LMU Munich)
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- Chair:
-
Sahana Udupa
(LMU Munich)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 14 University Square (UQ), 01/007
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to rethink work, value and labor, and lived experiences bundled around them in mediated contexts, and what consequences they have for how inequalities are reproduced in the digital age.
Long Abstract:
Digital media and technologies have been entangled in multiple and complex ways in defining what constitutes work as well as the experience and organization of everyday work routines. These entanglements are starkly felt in the current context of the pandemic and reduced mobility. Digital media have impacted the ways people perform their work, experience family and friend relationships, organize their times, and manage the boundaries between work and private life. At the same time, digital capitalist logics continue to define the contours of work, leisure and labor, as commercial digital media companies enlist user interactivity for monetizable data relations and through precarious labor arrangements to perform digital activities ranging from content moderation to designing platform architectures. These developments have shaped the conditions that define who is paid and unpaid, what is valued and devalued, and how work is demarcated, (out)sourced and appropriated.
For this panel, we invite contributions that ethnographically examine work and digital media through analytical scales ranging from felt experiences of delocalized working practices and "virtualization" of work with digital interactions to global inequalities in digital work and different forms of precarious labor. We also invite explorations of initiatives that have creatively utilized digital media to subvert and challenge unequal conditions of work, as well as to make "work" more humane in these pressing times. The panel aims to rethink work, value and labor, and lived experiences bundled around them in mediated contexts, and what consequences they have for how inequalities are reproduced in the digital age.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the role of social media in shaping hope and visions for a better future among precarious workers and unemployed people in northern Italy affected by the global economic crisis that started in 2008 and went on to hit the world.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the role of social media in shaping hope and visions for a better future among people affected by the global economic crisis that started with the Wall Street crash in 2008 and went on to hit Italy and the world. In 2008, Italy entered a period of protracted economic crisis that brought profound transformations to the lives of millions of people. In 2019, many working adults in Milan, the main economic and productive centre of Italy, would describe their lives as characterised by a turning point: some lost their jobs, others saw their salary reduced, others started experiencing poor working conditions, and many young adults went back to live with their parents because they could not pay their bills anymore. Ten years after the financial crisis, the lives of many adults in Northern Italy continue to be characterised by high levels of uncertainty, precarity, or unemployment. By viewing hope as mediated practice, the chapter shows the ways in which social media and hope are interconnected and co-construct each other. Among unemployed and precarious workers, the hope mediated by social media and online branding tends to be more about surviving the difficulties of the present rather than working towards a better future. It helps them better cope with the consequences of structural inequalities, and eventually reproduces precarious workers' subordinations. The chapter advocates for the use of the conceptual tools from media anthropology to enhance the ethnographic study of hope, work, and social inequality in neoliberal times.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the everyday practices of Brazilian migrant women to access work as cleaners and make a home in London as they navigate virtual, domestic and urban spaces. Between the online and offline, new forms of labour organisation, informal tactics and conceptions of domestic work emerge.
Paper long abstract:
Across different social media platforms, a busy landscape of public and private online spaces bring together a growing number of Brazilian workers in London. These spaces are key to many migrant workers, who continuously look for advice based on lived experience and first-hand reports on changes in the European labour market, such as those seen during the coronavirus pandemic. Brazilians connect online to share mobility strategies, accommodation, memes, services, church events and, most of all, work - especially cleaning jobs for women. Drawing from a digital ethnography of 11 months, this paper explores the everyday practices of Brazilian cleaners to make a home in London as they navigate virtual, domestic and urban spaces. In specific social media spaces, cleaners discuss shifts in the job market and differences between Brazil and the UK, share videos of their cleaning routines, negotiate job positions in Brazilian "cleaning rotas" or simply get together. Newcomers also learn informal tactics to use on-demand work platforms and job search websites, which are added to a broader set of online/offline strategies to access work. Importantly, these forms of mediated sociality may expand discourses and practices that challenge stigmatised notions of domestic work from Brazil and create new forms of labour organisation within a sector historically considered "unorganisable", fostering transnational solidarity networks. For cleaners who are also producers and consumers of online content, the smartphone becomes a gateway to communities of belonging that blur the lines between the online and the offline and between "here" and "there".
Paper short abstract:
Our paper explores the use of selfies and other images in the everyday organization of accountability, work/time discipline and networks of visibility in projects and services delivered by remote workers operating in the margins of the 'hybrid' state in Delhi, India.
Paper long abstract:
In India the taking of "selfies" as a means of checking if workers or school children are present is becoming increasingly prevalent. Facial recognition software is used to log pupils into classrooms. Corporations offering "at home services" via digital platforms use selfies to confirm the identity of operatives. Workers in community facing roles, often working remotely in the margins of the neoliberal state, circulate selfies and other images as evidence of presence and tasks completed via WhatsApp groups set up by project managers. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in Delhi in 2021 this paper explores the everyday production of networks of visibility within projects by employers and workers, and the informal repurposing as organizational tools and 'transparency devices' of messaging and social media apps designed to facilitate participatory digital cultures of pleasure, leisure and self-making. By paying attention to these practices we begin to develop a grounded view of the ways in which technology, media, and image making practices play a key role in the everyday organization of projects and services and are becoming woven into regimes of transparency, accountability and work/time discipline.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I analyse how business logic of news making intersect with digital sovereignty wars in the example of journalists who can no longer take part in news making practices in Turkey but need to continue doing their job at a distance from Germany.
Paper long abstract:
In the digital age of information, journalists search for new ways to get their stories read, to be paid for their labour, and to influence public policy and political change. In the context of exiled media, the political economy of new media worlds helps to reveal and assess the correlations between complex forms of media ownership and emerging new media regulations. Neither public broadcasting services nor non-profit organisations that benefit from fund raising and third-party funding to support journalism-in-exile are immune from the business logic of journalism which makes life difficult for migrant journalists. This profit-oriented business logic also drives national governments to enforce laws to regulate the tech companies that increasingly have monopoly over news and information in the context of sovereignty battles in the digital space. Exiled journalists navigate the conflict between national laws and international standards while making news to ensure the freedom of masses to access information. However, national governments intervene to transnational communication, as in the example of the Internet Law in Turkey, and jeopardises the freedom of speech enabled by free online tools offered by social media platforms. In this paper, I analyse these intermingled power relations in the example of journalists who can no longer take part in news making practices in Turkey but continue doing their job at a distance from Germany. I will use data from my research on new modalities and transnational repercussions of making news exceeding national borders that I have been conducting since 2018.