Category: Projects

Autonomist Marxism Reading Group

April 26, 2021 /

The Autonomist Marxist Reading Group brings together PhD students and faculty from departments across the UC San Diego Division of the Arts & Humanities to develop critical agendas inspired by Marxist and Autonomist thought. Through close readings and group discussion, we draw connections between past and present worker struggles and mobilization for better conditions in response to technology’s role in the transformation of the social relations of work amidst major shifts in regimes of accumulation.

Support from the UC San Diego Institute of Arts & Humanities (IAH) Creating Conversations, Interdisciplinary Research Grant, 2018-2019 and 2019-2020.

Co-organizers: Davide Carpano & Dorothy Howard

Reading List

Jens Beckert (2019). The exhausted futures of neoliberalism: From promissory legitimacy to social anomy. Journal of Cultural Economy, 1-13.

Franco Berardi (2009). The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Semiotext(e).

Finn Bowring (2004). From mass worker to the multitude: A theoretical contextualization of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Capital & Class.

Harry Cleaver (1979). Reading Capital Politically. Harvester Press.

Patrick Cunningham (2015). Mapping the terrain of struggle. Viewpoint Magazine.

Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999). Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. University of Illinois Press.

Silvia Federici & Mario Montano (1972). Theses on the mass worker and social capital. Radical America, 6, 3-21.

Luciano Floridi (2014). Hyperhistory and the philosophy of information policies, In The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era. Springer Nature.

Vera Khovanskaya, Lynn Dombrowski, Jeffrey Rzeszotarski, & Phoebe Sengers (2019). The tools of management: Adapting historical union tactics to platform-mediated labor. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3 (CSCW), 1-22.

Lotta Continua (1973). Take over the city: Community struggle in Italy. Radical America.

Sam Lowry (2008). Worker and student struggles in Italy, 1962-1973.

Sandro Mezzadra (2009). Italy: Operaism and Postoperaism, In International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. Wiley Blackwell.

Lisa Nakamura (2015). The unwanted labor of venture community management. New Formations, 86(86), 106-112.

Paolo Virno (2001). General Intellect, in Lessico Postfordista (Eds. Zanini and Fadini). Milan: Feltrinelli.

Kalindi Vora & Neda Atanasoski (2015). Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. Duke University Press.

Kathy Weeks (2007). Life within and against work: Affective labor, feminist critique, and post-Fordist politics. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 7(1), 233-249.

Kathy Weeks (2011). The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press.

Steve Wright (2006). There and back and back again: Mapping Autonomist feminism. [Paper delivered at the conference: Immaterial Labour, Multitudes and New Social Subjects: Class Composition in Cognitive Capitalism], Cambridge, 29-30.

Jack Linchuan Qiu (2017). Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition. University of Illinois Press.

Public Software for Transportation Justice

March 8, 2020 /

This research project addresses the expansion of “the smart city” by exploring the challenge and opportunities of public software infrastructures. We’ve partnered with United Taxi Workers San Diego, an immigrant-led and union-affiliated worker center, to explore the benefits and challenges of public sector dispatch applications. This work begins with the well-being of taxi workers in a time of Uber and Lyft, but works at the intersections of fair labor, public safety, disability justice, and carbon reduction.

Most contemporary knowledge of designing, building and maintaining software has emerged in relation to the private sector marketplace. This project discovers the specific requirements of software development within the public sector and accountable to democratic institutions. This project aims to answer the following questions:

How do public sector organizations maintain and transform software? How do public sector organizational processes shape and constrain maintenance?
What participatory design methods effectively bring citizens into public sector software design and governance?
What are the benefits and drawbacks of public sector platforms alternatives to private sector platforms?

Broadly, this project addresses the social problem of the smart city as services and data collection largely facilitated by private companies, ceding privacy, wage, welfare, and access policies to private sector actors. For example, what kinds of data collection and algorithmic control are desirable for workers, riders, and public planners? How can advocating for taxi worker well being also improve mobility independence for all San Diegans? What are the limits of platform transportation companies like Uber and Lyft determined by their commitment to independent contractor business models?

We address these research questions through workshops with taxi workers, qualitative research with public sector software developers, and participant observation with United Taxi Workers and their allies.

Institute for Perverse Outcomes

March 8, 2020 /

The Institute for Perverse Outcomes (IPO) explores and articulates the latent harms and possibilities of current and future technology platforms, especially in relation to economic systems that mold technologies. IPO was conceptualized with Finn Brunton (NYU, Media Culture and Communication).

The first project of IPO has been Slightly Dystopian Demos.

Slightly Dystopian Demos respond to the challenges of demonstrating latent harms of actually existing software infrastructures — specifically, San Diego’s GE Current smart streetlight system. It can be hard for people to imagine how anonymized data about seemingly harmless categories — here, pedestrians, motorists, and bicyclists — can serve as building blocks for public harm. In this project, our team worked in collaboration with members of TRUST Coalition to brainstorm questionable or harmful uses of current public data APIs and build software apps that demonstrate harmful applications. This project is an exercise in speculative design reasoning in service of public deliberation on technologies rather than the innovating of value.

Our work made it into Voice of San Diego’s report “Smart Streetlights Aren’t Delivering the Data Boosters Promised.”

IPO sometimes launches reports under less cheeky monikers. Our report “Broken Promises of Civic Innovation: Technological, Organizational, Fiscal, and Equity Challenges of GE Current CityIQ” (May 1, 2020) details how San Diego’s smart city deployment is failing its citizens.

Burnout: The Epistemologies of a Modern Condition

March 8, 2020 /

Lead researcher: Dorothy Howard (PhD student, Communication)

This project investigates the social history of burnout and how organizations have built expertise to address burnout as a dimension of wellness and work culture. Qualitative case studies in the health sciences and software are presented to offer comparative insight on burnout as it moves through multiple domains and discourses. Historical and archival research on psychology and work design provide background to cast recent burnout research against the background of scientific management. This project engages existing work in organizational science on the situated practices in which organizations conduct operational research to create transformations in workplace culture and productivity, and how this affects working life.

This project will help us understand the complexities of creating initiatives to address organizational change. Participatory workshops on burnout and wellness will both generate ethnographic knowledge for the research design and facilitate opportunities for reflection in group activities to represent how burnout manifests in institutional contexts. The broader impacts of this work will be to elucidate practices of construct-formation in the sciences and the complexities of organizational change, while producing a more complete picture of an enigmatic diagnosis in the history of occupational health.

Supported by the NSF-STS Science, Technology & Society, Doctoral Dissertation Research Initiative Grant (DDRIG). April 1, 2020-Ongoing.

Making Makers in Latin America

March 8, 2020 /

Lead researcher: Verónica Uribe del Águila (PhD student, Communication)

This multi-site research integrates quantitative and qualitative methods to explore how Latin American makers communities manage, and frame as desirable, the economic risk inherent in fast prototyping projects. As sociotechnical systems or networks developed in the United State are rendered global, it is important to research, along with their origins, the shapes they take when deployed in other contexts.

This research investigates 3 questions:

1) How do makers cultures– built around values of prototype, innovation and do it yourself practices (DIY) –transform economic perception and sensibilities in Latin American countries?

2) How do practices at maker spaces in Latin America build on as much as help legitimize forms of technological, economic and cultural transformation in the region?

3) How do fast prototyping technologies–3D printers, printed board circuits, and open-source fast-prototyping platforms –as well as the transnational networks in which they circulate and the narratives they produce –help normalize, operationalize and standardize a global form of “venture labor”?