4S 2017 CfP: Techno-jobs and Capital
*** apologies for cross-posting*** *Call for papers: Annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)* Boston, MA, USA, Aug 30-Sep 2 2017* * Submission deadline: March 1, 2017 through the conference system (https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s17/) Feel free to contact us if you consider submitting to our panel. *Panel 126. Techno-Jobs and Capital* Organizers: Winifred Poster, Washington University (wrposter@gmail.com); Norma Möllers, Queen’s University (norma.mollers@queensu.ca) STS has a long tradition of inquiring about techno-work and providing foundations for studies of locality, partiality, contingency, and agency. Less attention is paid to the connections of techno-jobs to the systems of political economy in which they are embedded. The goal of this track is to encourage explicit discussion of the ways these new jobs are shaped by and sustain capital, and how they relate to broader shifts in the organization of labor and workers. We emphasize how this applies to both elite and subordinate types of techno-labor. It includes high-status jobs like the entrepreneurs and evangelists who market and distribute technical products for firms and nations, software coders who are bound by corporate non-compete contracts, techno-venture firms that are scrutinized for under-employing women, high-tech developers that rely on immigrant labor and the ‘body shopping’ practices of intermediary contracting firms, etc. It also includes a growing sector of middle and low status workers like the data janitors who clean up the internet, senior citizen ‘workampers’ who travel in their RV’s to labor at Amazon.com warehouses, manual workers who dispose of our phones and laptops, etc. We welcome papers that engage issues such as: transnational and post-colonial labor dynamics; techno-venture capitalists; R&D labor; crowdsourcing and micro-labor; outsourcing; sharing economies; creative, media, and game labor; automation; bot labor; algorithmic controls of labor; consumer labor; maintenance, repair, and care; labors of techno-waste and breakdown; racialized, gender, queer, and (dis)abled inequalities of technical labor; and digital strategies within the labor movement.
participants (1)
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Norma Möllers