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News on Labor & Economy
Tech sector whistleblowers have played an increasingly vital role in exposing racism and toxic workplace environments, algorithmic bias, and other platform harms. But the cost of coming forward with information […]
Lilly Irani is an associate professor of communication & science studies at the University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical […]
Based on an ethnographic project in a public high school in a low-income neighborhood in South Los Angeles, this paper argues that access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) cannot […]
An event advertised as the first all-women’s hackathon in Latin America was held in México in 2015. Highly ephemeral but also highly visible, the hackathon functions as a critical site […]
This article explores how young people position themselves in relation to promises of technology and progress during a time of political transition in Mexico. My fieldwork took place between 2013 […]
Héctor Beltrán is a sociocultural anthropologist who draws upon his background in computer science to understand how the technical aspects of computing intersect with issues of identity, race, ethnicity, class, […]
As HCI researchers have explored the possibilities of human computation, they have paid less attention to ethics and values of crowdwork. This paper offers an analysis of Amazon Mechanical Turk, […]
Crowdsourcing systems do more than get information work done. This paper argues that microwork systems produce the difference between “innovative” laborers and “menial” laborers, ameliorating resulting tensions in new media […]
Digitally mediated labor can take many forms: valorized and visible, hidden and forgotten, or even disavowed. This article examines one particular digital work system: Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). AMT is […]
South Asian historiography, experimental and theoretically sophisticated since the 1980s, has influenced almost all contemporary theorizing about colonialism and its aftermath. But how useful are global generalizations and future-oriented strategies […]
Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, […]