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News on Labor & Economy
Despite the continued push to automate and digitize agricultural work in the Salinas Valley, certain crops, like romaine lettuce, are not suitable for harvesting automation due to their delicate nature, highlighting the continued importance of farmworkers. In this essay, 2024 Data Fluencies Grantee Summer Sullivan examines the history of Silicon Valley’s influence over California’s agricultural sector as well as the work farmworkers do out on the lettuce fields.
Jaylexia Clark is a Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Recently, she graduated from the […]
The platform gig economy has grown over the last few years, especially since the pandemic, and it has reshaped the worker experience and workers’ relationship with consumers. This is particularly true for Black gig workers in the United States. In this essay, Jaylexia Clark examines how platform gig apps reproduce racial disparities by surveilling Black workers’ behavior and demanding Black platform workers to perform emotional labor, through the apps’ features such as customer ratings and feedback.
Peter Howson is a technology writer, researcher, and assistant professor in international development at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He has written extensively on the social and environmental impacts of cryptocurrencies and […]
In this essay, 2023 Data Fluencies Grantee Jason Ludwig examines how race and data in the labor market manifested by looking at the history of the US Employment Service, which aimed to create equitable employment opportunities through colorblind computing and data practices. However, as Ludwig argues, race remained embedded in the data despite its overt omission.
Emma Vossen is a writer and researcher with a PhD from the University of Waterloo. She is the coauthor and coeditor of the book Feminism in Play (Palgrave, 2018) and […]
Kriangsak Teerakowitkajorn is a labor geographer whose work engages with issues at the intersection of labor, technology, and alternatives to capitalism. He is the founder and director of the Just […]
Summer Sullivan is a PhD candidate in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work examines how emergent technologies affect workers and ecologies. Her project dissertation explores […]
Data Fluencies Program Officer Dannah Dennis interviewed Héctor Beltrán about his recently published book Code Work: Hacking across the US/México Techno-Borderlands, discussing how computing intersects with issues of identity, race, ethnicity, class, and nation.
Ana Flavia Badue is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the emergence of an agricultural innovation industry in Brazil. By examining the […]
Huan He is an assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University and holds a PhD in American studies and ethnicity from the University of Southern California. From 2022–2023, He was […]