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Paper short abstract:

This paper surfaces and interrogates underlying and often unspoken assumptions around commodified work in order to propose new conceptual and theoretical frameworks for anthropologically reimagining the future of work in a time of rapid technological transformation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to surface and then interrogate underlying and often unspoken assumptions around work – and more specifically, around commodified human activity -- in order to propose new conceptual and theoretical frameworks for anthropologically rethinking the future of work in a time of rapid technological transformation. It begins with ongoing debates around the problem(s) with work, moving beyond a focus on exploitation and working conditions, to argue for an emphasis on distributive justice, care, ecological crises and racial capitalism in order to denaturalise and decentre the role of commodified work in human society. It demonstrates the long history as well as the current urgency of these critiques. The paper then draws on my own empirical research in South Africa as well as broader scholarship to analyse widely-held attachments to work, even in the face of such critiques. In particular it demonstrates the way morality and deservingness; distribution and meritocracy; and meaning-making and sociality have intertwined with commodified work into a nostalgically productivist moral economy of capitalism. The paper argues that this moral economy acts as a block to a fundamental rethinking or transformation of the future of commodified work. Building on this, the paper looks beyond techno-optimists’ and techno-pessimists’ narrow focus on the implications of AI for work futures, using case studies from 19th-century movements for shorter working hours to advocacy for universal basic income (UBI) to argue that future transformations of work are not inevitable (nor technologically determined), but rather outcomes of agentive collective struggles.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper advocates an anthropological view of work futures beyond sociological constraints, exploring situated work lives. Ethnographic research unveils tech visions' effect on workers navigating automation, stressing the role of a future-oriented perspective in grasping future work complexities.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I argue for an anthropological approach to work futures that goes beyond the constraints posed by sociological categorisations of labour, particularly the repertoire of resistance and precarity and the orientation to the past, keeping the horizon of work as reestablishing previous configurations (Weber, 2009; Weston, 2012), by focusing on the situated work lives and disposition and emerging values in work transformation. As exploring futures becomes increasingly crucial for anthropologists, developing new conceptual and methodological tools and modes of engagement is critical to understanding the ongoing transformations concerning work. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with workers from two distinct industries in Spain and Australia: platform workers and health practitioners dealing with the challenges and the envisioned opportunities posed by the exposure to automation in their workspaces. I analyse how the visions of automated work futures provided by the tech industry and media manifest in everyday work life, propagating notions of value emancipated from production and attributed to innovation and individual action (Lanzeni & Pink, 2021) within the traditional industrial sectors. This analysis offers valuable insights into how workers navigate technological changes in different work settings and highlights how an orientation to futures can contribute to a deeper understanding of the complexities that encompass work futures.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the unstable ways in which labour is invoked and experienced by farmers in south-east Australia. I argue for the enduring salience of ‘labour’—in dialogue with the turn to ‘work’—as a conceptual lens through which to grasp present and future regimes of power and possession.

Paper long abstract:

What it means to labour — what the stakes of labour are — are increasingly uncertain propositions. Indeed, the reconfigurations of late capitalism compel questions about whether ‘labour’ itself retains any significant conceptual utility as a means of describing and analysing diverse expressions of production and livelihood. In this context, a turn towards ‘work’ offers the possibility of a more inclusive frame, tied particularly to new frontiers of automation and other technologically-mediation transformations. And yet, ‘labour’ invokes aspects of political economy, of collectivity and struggle, and of embodied physicality, that feel important not to lose.

In this paper, I draw on fieldwork conducted with both farmers and farmworkers in the Australian horticultural region of Shepparton to explore the conceptual affordances, and limits, of 'labour' in changing times. While my farmer interlocutors largely resisted understanding their own personal experiences of agricultural production explictly in terms of labour—using this term solely to describe the farmworkers they employed—they nevertheless described their experiences in terms of a gruelling physicality, invoking notions of work ethic, nostalgic recollections, and traditions of claim-making over place that often had labour at their core. Reflecting on the divergent and unstable ways in which labour is invoked, narrated and experienced in this agricultural landscape, I ask: what kinds and degrees of elasticity can we reasonably impose upon the concepts we deploy in anthropological analysis? What might ‘labour’—as distinct from, or in dialogue with the turn to ‘work’—offer to a future-focused anthropology?

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This paper examines the tensions, temporalities, and forms of ideological labor latent in U.S. police diversity efforts. It argues that internal struggles around diversification represent an epistemological battle over entangled police futures and histories—one staged on grounds defined by police.

Paper long abstract:

Calls to diversify U.S. police forces, long dominated by white male officers, have often followed public spectacles of racist police violence. After the 1960s urban rebellions, the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and recent Black Lives Matter protests, police departments across the U.S. renewed efforts to increase diversity in their ranks by recruiting more women and people of color. Diversity reforms are designed to render police more representative of the communities they serve, and to thereby cultivate trust and legitimacy among residents. In other words, reform advocates imagine that recomposing police workforces to mirror the bodies and “cultures” of the policed will beget less violent futures—even as such long-promised futures continually recede into the horizon. This paper will consider the tensions, temporalities, and forms of ideological labor latent in police diversity efforts. Drawing on ethnographic research with police workers in Arizona, USA, I examine how advocates for police diversification labor to maintain belief in its unrealized possibilities—against internal resistance and a recent tide of legislative attacks on diversity policies—by mobilizing utopian visions of an institution whose perfect synchrony with community desires, optics, and “cultures” spares it from public critique. I counterpose this labor to the dystopian imaginaries animating internal backlash to diversity policies, which often forecasts futures of white male disenfranchisement and ensuing occupational decline. I argue that these struggles around police diversification represent an epistemological battle over the constitutive entanglement between police futures and police histories—one staged upon grounds that remain defined by police.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation highlights the misalignment between industry visions about GenAI and creative work, and the everyday experiences of music technologists. By drawing on an ethnographic study in Melbourne, it reveals how these communities value accidents and glitches over LLM aim for precision.

Paper long abstract:

Generative AI is largely seen in industry narratives as a revolutionary force that will democratise, reshape and enhance human creativity, as well as potentially alleviating tasks for improved efficiency and productivity. However, people working at the intersection of music and technology may complicate this vision, with creative practices and expectations around AI and automation that are shaped by and evolve with everyday life.

This article shows the limitations and misalignment between dominant visions about the impact of GenAI on creativity, and the experiences of music technologists. Thus, it draws upon examples of an ethnographic study of these communities in Melbourne. These insights emerged from a collaborative and co-creative process alongside the research participants during one year and a half of fieldwork. The findings reveal that although there is a cautious enthusiasm towards generative AI and automation in their practice, most creative workers remain dubious about its potential to achieve human-like emotions, expressive qualities and tacit communication. Additionally, while LLM aims for full precision and perfection, music technologists value mistakes, ‘happy accidents’ and glitches as a way to counter depersonalisation and homogenisation, embracing creative uncertainty.

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Paper short abstract:

In Cluj and Bologna youth go through digital reconversion to ensure a work future, reinventing themselves as tech workers (programmers, testers, and videogame designers). What forms of collective and prefigurative action are possible for workers newly initiated in the politics of abstraction?

Paper long abstract:

Based on comparative research in Bologna (Italy) and Cluj-Napoca (Romania), this paper explores the politics of tech workers contending with rapid technological change (including AI and automation) while navigating the ever more precarious labor landscape of contemporary capitalism. The focus is on youth who go through programs of digital reconversion to ensure a work future, reinventing themselves as tech workers (programmers, testers, and videogame designers) worthy of rewarding, well-paid jobs.

Politics stands here for the meaning and scope of political action in a global context that posits a digitally induced end to politics (post-politics, anti-politics and/or hyperpolitics). Moreover, politics is crucial to the imagination of work futures that can withstand the threat of automation. In an ethnographic key, the relationship between politics and digital technologies is (re)configured as part of everyday labor processes. How do the digital tools employed in everyday labor (programming languages, game engines, machine learning, etc.) impinge upon workers’ understanding of political action and futurity? What forms of collective and prefigurative action are prescribed by these technologies? Digital labor is rife with abstractions and black-boxing – becoming socialized in these abstractions often comes at the cost of bracketing the social and the political. While work with abstraction is generally assumed to lead to a politics subsumed by technological solutionism, this paper also emphasizes those few alternatives and shortcuts that workers imagine as they carve out a potentially new space and vocabulary for work-based political action.

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Paper short abstract:

We draw on ethnographic study revolving around prisoners in Finland producing data to train machine learning algorithms, approaching data labour as a form of knowledge work, in an attempt to open up space for engagement with uncertainty brought by automation in the spirit of ‘futures anthropology’.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we draw on our ongoing ethnographic study conducted in Finland revolving around prisoners producing datasets for training machine learning algorithms deployed in the Finnish construction industry. The involvement of prison labour in the development of algorithmic systems has from the onset raised concerns outside Finland, but in the country the case has been anything but controversial. Among prison authorities, data labour is primarily understood as a continuation of previously existing institutional practices of prison work. At the same time, prisoners’ involvement in training machine learning algorithms is seen by prison leaders as a clear departure from the past, marking the shift from manual labour done in Finnish prisons (such as metal work, packaging, sewing and similar) to more cognitively oriented tasks, which are in the scholarly literature designated as ‘knowledge work’.

We closely examine the process of producing data in Finnish prisons to train machine learning algorithms as a form of knowledge work, aiming to expand understanding of the construction industry in the country. What does this work actually entail? What do prisoners teach the machine? What do they learn from the machine? What kind of benefits and harms are envisioned to come on the basis of this particular instantiation of human-computer interaction? By answering these questions, we attempt to go beyond both utopian and dystopian imaginaries of work futures in which algorithmic systems play a prominent role and open up space for engagement with uncertainty brought by automation in the spirit of ‘futures anthropology’.

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Paper short abstract:

The study examines “Collaborative Foresight” methodology by Media Evolution, Sweden, via active participation in envisioning AI-driven work futures. We disentangle the interplay between "future-makers" and "future-takers", and asses the role of the process in facilitating future work scenarios.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the "Collaborative Foresight" process, which is an initiative organized by the authors in partnership with Media Evolution, a Swedish organization based in Malmö. The foresight cycle in focus aimed to explore potential futures of work with emerging AI technologies by engaging a diverse group of experts and community members in forecasting and “futuring” activities, following the methodology offered by Media Evolution. The authors actively participated in this cycle, which allowed for a thorough examination of the methodologies utilized in such foresight exercises.

At the heart of our investigation is the dynamic tension between "future-makers" - those actively shaping possible futures, and "future-takers" - individuals adapting to these projected scenarios. Our study explores how the interplay and evolving tensions between these roles are influenced by the structure of foresight practice and the facilitator's practices. We investigate how this approach fosters a participatory environment where participants are encouraged to not only predict but also contribute actively to the creation of future work paradigms within the boundaries of the foresight cycle structure.

Our analysis focuses on the methodology of the foresight cycle, highlighting its role as a facilitative and inhibitory tool that requires participants to oscillate between the imaginative realms of future-making and the practicalities of future-taking. The research illuminates the importance of questioning initiatives such as collaborative foresighting and their role in shaping industry narratives about the future of work.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that agricultural labour can never be appropriately compensated in a capitalist political economy because of the necessity of keeping food accessible. Utopian spatial and temporal reorganisations of society that fundamentally address metabolic rifts are proposed.

Paper long abstract:

Small, ecologically-oriented farms in the Global North have become popular places for individuals to voluntarily exchange their labour for experiential learning and room and board in lieu of wages. Despite this 'free' labour, such farms almost invariably struggle financially, with reported farmer salaries suggesting many live below defined poverty lines. Critical scholarship has argued that this situation amounts to farmers' 'self-exploitation', and that moral economy framings of these circumstances both obscure and exacerbate systemic inequities. While some critics recognise the myriad value forms that exist alongside exchange value in these spaces, such critiques have difficulty imagining futures outside of a capitalist political economy, and make recommendations accordingly. This paper follows the Graeberian (2001) assertion that (Marxian) critical analyses lack the ability to imagine alternatives beyond capitalism while following the (Maussian) impulse to seek post-capitalist futures. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at ecological farms in Italy and Finland, I argue agricultural labour can never be appropriately compensated in a capitalist political economy, and suggest that the critique of 'self-exploitation' is an unhelpfully reductive analysis, particularly for scholar-activists engaged in and with alternative food networks (AFNs). I use the concept of 'ecological livelihoods' (Miller 2019) as a basis for proposing degrowth-oriented futures that don't take monetary value forms or continued reliance on immigrant agricultural labour as natural or common-sense solutions, and instead attend to metabolic rifts by toying with utopian ideas of radical spatial and temporal societal reorganisations that re-embed food and farming work into everyday life.

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My paper deals with the socio-ecological consequences of the intertwined processes of electric transition and the growing international presence of Chinese firms in the automotive industry. It integrates the traditions of labor regime analysis, environmental labor studies and anthropology of labor.

Paper long abstract:

My paper deals with the socio-ecological consequences of the intertwined processes of electric transition and the growing international presence of Chinese firms in the automotive industry. I present the initial findings of an ethnographic study of the labor regime in the Hungarian automotive industry, with a focus on the city of Debrecen. Debrecen serves as a strategic point for studying these interlinked processes, facilitated by the Hungarian government's approach to compete for FDIs through the relaxation of labor standards and environmental regulations. The clustering of Chinese battery and electric vehicle producers in Debrecen has been accompanied by concerns about health, safety, and pollution, leading to locals’ protest against the factories. Simultaneously, the labor pool of the factories has been extended to include precarious university students and temporary workers from the Global South, reminiscing flexible ‘dormitory labor regimes’.

What new modes of organizing labor and ecology are emerging from these intertwined processes? My paper is based on ethnographic research in Debrecen, with a focus on two Chinese firms. My project integrates the traditions of labor regime analysis, environmental labor studies and anthropology of labor. I consider the broader labor regime formed around factories as multiscalar systems of labor control and regulation, which produce and reproduce workers and ecologies. This perspective allows me to connect the everyday experiences of workers to broader processes of capitalist reorganization, valorization, and racialization. Also, it enables an understanding of social reproduction and ecology as integrated components of the production process, broadening the scope of labor politics.