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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how women data annotators in rural China negotiate ethics of care and productivity. Through state imaginaries and care infrastructures, migrant women redefine "good work," utilizing AI annotation labor as a pragmatic solution to balance economic survival and reproductive labor.

Paper long abstract

Recent critiques of the platform economy often frame data annotation as precarious "invisible labor" or "digital sweatshops." This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in rural "poverty alleviation" data centers in China to explore how women workers actively negotiate the ethics, values, and hierarchies of their labor. In particular, this paper focus on the phenomenon of reverse migration, where rural women leave urban areas to return to their hometowns, lured by the promise of participating in the digital economy as "AI Training Specialists."

The paper investigates three key intersections of digital infrastructure and work ethics. First, it analyzes how state and corporate socio-technical imaginaries construct a promise of modernity that redefines rural return as patriotic participation in national digital strategy. This shifts the workers’ self-conception from low-skilled laborers to creative, high-tech subjects, allowing them to claim a sense of fairness and deservingness denied to them in urban factory settings. Second, it examines the material infrastructures of care embedded in these firms, such as “Child Growth Spaces.” This paper argues these spaces represent a “post-socialist feminized practice” where the state, market, and family co-construct a regime that simultaneously absorbs productive and reproductive labor. Finally, this paper positions AI data annotation work is a "pragmatic solution" for these migrant women. By situating these laborers within shifting vernaculars of work, it reveals how they navigate the ambivalence of everyday life, synchronizing global digital demands with local care practices to define a new, albeit complex, vision of "good work."