This award supported dissertation fieldwork for a project that began with a focus on diverse ethical commitments frame sociotechnical imaginaries, which in turn shape investment in and work with tech-for-good in precarious contexts. In the course of ethnography, the focus has shifted to networked, transnational labor organizing among digital platform workers, many of whom are displaced people. The award allowed for a networked, multi-sited approach to ethnography that supported activism toward improved working conditions on digital platform apps for vulnerable workers. 

In terms of intellectual merit, the outcomes of this project include a research products (a dissertation and journal manuscript) which argues that to understand transnational activism, we must ethnographically attend to “friction,” or the work it takes to make global concepts meaningful locally. Although existing research has claimed that the transnational reach of platform companies and the common rhetoric used to recruit workers has set the stage for global solidarities among precarious workers, this project highlights the contingent work of activists that is required to put solidarity in motion. Concepts like unionism are resignified from their connotations in regional histories through the deliberate efforts of activists. This project has also resulted in a conference submission that analyzes the ways gig worker activists come to understand, manage, and project the global scale of their movement-making efforts. I take the approach of an “ethnography of scale,” highlighting the practices and artifacts that make the global scale concrete for activists. The chapter argues that projecting the global scale does not require taking a scalable approach, where scalability is understood as the ability to uniformly and indefinitely expand without changing the nature of the project or constituent parts. Rather, I argue that scale is enacted through mutually transforming engagements, through a process of proliferation. Through its focus on actors and technologies supporting migrants, as well as transnational labor organizing, this work contributes to the delinking of conceptions of sociotechnical imaginaries from nations, exploring how more transnational, cosmopolitan sociotechnical imaginaries cohere and shape technical investments and practices.  

In terms of broader impact, this project has supported the efforts of vulnerable gig workers to advocate and organize for better working conditions. The project has also brought greater attention to the possibilities and challenges of solidarity across national and regional borders, as workers seek to unite across differences to fight the extreme exploitation of platform work. The entrance of platform work to economies rife with unemployment and underemployment can be understood under a dominant sociotechnical imaginary that celebrates the success of tech startups in disrupting existing industries. However, this research has demonstrated, alongside many other studies by academics and workers themselves, that these work arrangements evade legal protections for workers and take advantage of the desperation of vulnerable people. The project has shown the importance of considering immigration regimes and displacement crises that leave many people without citizenship protections alongside efforts to regulate platform companies. This population is often reliant on gig work for survival, and sometimes participates in demonstrations to prevent regulation that would leave them with even fewer options. Rather than understanding these workers as duped by false consciousness, the link between migration regimes and platform work is emphasized in this project. 

Last Modified: 01/17/2025
Modified by: Lucy Pei