Download or read book Encoding Race Encoding Class written by Sareeta Amrute and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders' cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways.
Download or read book Encoding Race Encoding Class written by Sareeta Amrute and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders' cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways.
Download or read book Hacking Diversity written by Christina Dunbar-Hester and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We regularly read and hear exhortations for women to take up positions in STEM. The call comes from both government and private corporate circles, and it also emanates from enthusiasts for free and open source software (FOSS), i.e. software that anyone is free to use, copy, study, and change in any way. Ironically, rate of participation in FOSS-related work is far lower than in other areas of computing. A 2002 European Union study showed that fewer than 2 percent of software developers in the FOSS world were women. How is it that an intellectual community of activists so open in principle to one and all -a community that prides itself for its enlightened politics and its commitment to social change - should have such a low rate of participation by women? This book is an ethnographic investigation of efforts to improve the diversity in software and hackerspace communities, with particular attention paid to gender diversity advocacy"--
Download or read book Sociology Work and Organisations written by Brian McDonough and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-23 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible edited collection provides global context for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying the sociology of work and organisations. Composed of short, example-led chapters, this book covers a wide range of contemporary topics, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the digitalisation of work, the gig economy, and the shifting roles of women and other marginalised groups. The book’s innovative approach uses case studies as diverse as work–life balance in China, gender pay inequity in Britain and Germany, and the exploitation of workers on the Mexico–US border, to incorporate perspectives from both the Global North and South and provide students with the tools to analyse new developments in the rapidly changing world of work. The book is particularly concerned with inequalities and marginalisation in the workplace, discussing discrimination against women, ethnic minorities, migrants, and older workers. The book also explores how increasing digitalisation, the rise of the gig economy and the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted working practices and how this relates to precarious employment. Other chapters are dedicated to issues of workplace organisation, including female leadership, work–life balance, and well-being. The book goes on to explore how climate change and policies such as Universal Basic Income may shape the future of work in the near future. Each chapter also includes useful pedagogical resources including practice exam questions, key concepts and definitions, and further readings. Therefore, the book will be therefore essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying the sociology of work, business management, and organisation.
Download or read book Osiris Volume 38 written by James Evans and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perceptively explores the shifting intersections between algorithmic systems and human practices in the modern era. How have algorithmic systems and human practices developed in tandem since 1800? This volume of Osiris deftly addresses the question, dispelling along the way the traditional notion of algorithmic “code” and human “craft” as natural opposites. Instead, algorithms and humans have always acted in concert, depending on each other to advance new knowledge and produce social consequences. By shining light on alternative computational imaginaries, Beyond Craft and Code opens fresh space in which to understand algorithmic diversity, its governance, and even its conservation. The volume contains essays by experts in fields extending from early modern arithmetic to contemporary robotics. Traversing a range of cases and arguments that connect politics, historical epistemology, aesthetics, and artificial intelligence, the contributors collectively propose a novel vocabulary of concepts with which to think about how the history of science can contribute to understanding today’s world. Ultimately, Beyond Craft and Code reconfigures the historiography of science and technology to suggest a new way to approach the questions posed by an algorithmic culture—not only improving our understanding of algorithmic pasts and futures but also unlocking our ability to better govern our present.
Download or read book The Xinjiang emergency written by Michael Clarke and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is the site of the largest mass repression of an ethnic and/or religious minority in the world today. Researchers estimate that since 2016 one million people have been detained there without trial. In the detention centres individuals are exposed to deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress, while outside them more than ten million Turkic Muslim minorities are subjected to a network of hi-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints and interpersonal monitoring. Existing reportage and commentary on the crisis tend to address these issues in isolation, but this ground-breaking volume brings them together, exploring the interconnections between the core strands of the Xinjiang emergency in order to generate a more accurate understanding of the mass detentions’ significance for the future of President Xi Jinping’s China.
Download or read book Fabricating Silicon Savannah written by Michel Njeri Wahome and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive overview of technology start-up arenas in Nairobi and examines their global place. These start-ups are popularly perceived as representing future prosperity that is incorporated in the present. The author examines how developing country arenas lay bare the power asymmetries and taken-for-granted assumptions that determine which technoscientific imaginaries become globalized and universal, and are supported by legitimizing narratives, logics and institutions. A framing of ‘catch-up’ or ‘leapfrogging’ for technoscientific development that is based on capitalist modernity is regarded as incontrovertible—so much so that alternative values and approaches to technology production are rarely contemplated. This book documents how actors in Nairobi’s startup arena relate to these imaginaries and the affects, enactments and places that they produce.
Download or read book The Digital Environment written by Pablo J. Boczkowski and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding digital technology in daily life: why we should think holistically in terms of a digital environment instead of discrete devices and apps. Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long march toward the digitization of everyday life made possible by innovations in media, information, and communication technology. In The Digital Environment, Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein offer a new way to understand the role of the digital in our daily lives, calling on us to turn our attention from our discrete devices and apps to the array of artifacts and practices that make up the digital environment that envelops every aspect of our social experience. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein explore a series of issues raised by the digital takeover of everyday life, drawing on interviews with a variety of experts. They show how existing inequities of gender, race, ethnicity, education, and class are baked into the design and deployment of technology, and describe emancipatory practices that counter this--including the use of Twitter as a platform for activism through such hashtags as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. They discuss the digitization of parenting, schooling, and dating--noting, among other things, that today we can both begin and end relationships online. They describe how digital media shape our consumption of sports, entertainment, and news, and consider the dynamics of political campaigns, disinformation, and social activism. Finally, they report on developments in three areas that will be key to our digital future: data science, virtual reality, and space exploration.
Download or read book Financialization written by Chris Hann and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-08-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with an original historical vision of financialization in human history, this volume then continues with a rich set of contemporary ethnographic case studies from Europe, Asia and Africa. Authors explore the ways in which finance inserts itself into relationships of class and kinship, how it adapts to non-Western religious traditions, and how it reconfigures legal and ecological dimensions of social organization, and urban social relations in general. Central themes include the indebtedness of individuals and households, the impact of digital technologies, the struggle for housing, financial education, and political contestation.
Download or read book Behind the Screen written by Sarah T. Roberts and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity’s worst on today’s commercial internet Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material—sometimes thousands of items per day. Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers. This revealing investigation of the people “behind the screen” offers insights into not only the reality of our commercial internet but the future of globalized labor in the digital age.
Download or read book At the Edge of AI written by Libuse Hannah Veprek and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2024-07-31 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are human computation systems developed in the field of citizen science to achieve what neither humans nor computers can do alone? Through multiple perspectives and methods, Libuse Hannah Veprek examines the imagination of these assemblages, their creation, and everyday negotiation in the interplay of various actors and play/science entanglements at the edge of AI. Focusing on their human-technology relations, this ethnographic study shows how these formations are marked by intraversions, as they change with technological advancements and the actors' goals, motivations, and practices. This work contributes to the constructive and critical ethnographic engagement with human-AI assemblages in the making.
Download or read book A Precarious Game written by Ergin Bulut and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-15 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Precarious Game is an ethnographic examination of video game production. The developers that Ergin Bulut researched for almost three years in a medium-sized studio in the U.S. loved making video games that millions play. Only some, however, can enjoy this dream job, which can be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities involving the sacrificial labor of their families, unacknowledged work of precarious testers, and thousands of racialized and gendered workers in the Global South. A Precarious Game explores the politics of doing what one loves. In the context of work, passion and love imply freedom, participation, and choice, but in fact they accelerate self-exploitation and can impose emotional toxicity on other workers by forcing them to work endless hours. Bulut argues that such ludic discourses in the game industry disguise the racialized and gendered inequalities on which a profitable transnational industry thrives. Within capitalism, work is not just an economic matter, and the political nature of employment and love can still be undemocratic even when based on mutual consent. As Bulut demonstrates, rather than considering work simply as a matter of economics based on trade-offs in the workplace, we should consider the question of work and love as one of democracy rooted in politics.
Download or read book Circular Ecologies written by Amy Zhang and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-09 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in the early 2000s, Chinese policymakers came to see waste management as an object of environmental governance central to the creation of "modern" cities, and experimented with the circular economy, in which technology and policy could convert all forms of waste back into resources. Based on long-term research in Guangzhou, Circular Ecologies critically analyzes the implementation of technologies and infrastructures to modernize a mega-city's waste management system, and the grassroots ecological politics that emerged in response. In Guangzhou, waste's transformation revealed uncomfortable truths about China's environmental governance: a preference for technology over labor, the aestheticization of order, and the expropriation of value in service of an ecological vision. Amy Zhang argues that in post-reform China, waste—the material vestige of decades of growth and increasing consumption—is a systemic irritant that troubles China's technocratic governance. Waste provoked an unlikely coalition of urban communities, from the middle class to precarious migrant workers, that came to constitute a nascent, bottom-up environmental politics, and offers a model for conceptualizing ecological action under authoritarian conditions.
Download or read book Experimental Times written by DR. HEMANGINI. GUPTA and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-12-03 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experimental Times is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of "backend" IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. The book journeys alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a "Startup India" knitted through office work, at networking meetings and urban festivals, and across sites of leisure in the city. Tracking techno-futures that involve automation and impending precarity, Hemangini Gupta details the everyday forms of experimentation, care, and friendship that sustain and reproduce life and labor in India's current economy.
Download or read book Indebted Mobilities written by Susan Thomas and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-02-09 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As state funding to public universities becomes increasingly scarce, many universities have turned to a new student population to draw in revenue: international students. Typically fluent in English, and overwhelmingly enrolled in high-skill professional fields, students from India have consistently served as one of the most valuable student-migrant populations, and the United States has been their most popular destination. Assumed to be rationally calculating, ambitious, and globally minded consumers of higher education, these migrant youth are depicted as success stories of the global neoliberalization of education. But not all are wealthy or savvy, nor do they necessarily end up in a program that will leave them better off. Sociologist Susan Thomas followed a group of Indian middle-class men studying at a public university in New York for 16 months as they attended classes, worked in under-paid or unpaid research jobs, and socialized with each other. Thomas's ethnographic research shows that these men see themselves as pursuing successful careers, paths that they uniquely deserve due to their work ethic and intelligence. At the same time, that pathway is entangled within webs of obligation tethered to the imagined future returns of an American education. For these students, such obligations translate into an experience of indebtedness-materially, affectively, and morally. The students consider themselves the beneficiaries of an American education, accruing considerable financial debt to pay tuition and perceived moral debt to their families for the opportunity to study in the US, at the same time that they are marginalized on campus and off. They thus develop a logic of owing and being owed as a way to reconcile the ambivalences they experience while located on an American campus where they must form racial and class sensibilities as South Asian student-migrants. As students approach graduation, however, they are forced to reconcile the debts they have accrued with an uncertain return. Their final days on campus forced a reckoning with their anxieties about successful masculinities, which manifested through competitive frictions with one another, the uncertainties of supporting existing or future households, and the precarity of being drawn into the global knowledge economy as indebted migrants. Thomas illuminates not only how students' movements across national borders are an invaluable part of the neoliberalization of education, but also how this system forms indebted subjectivities"--
Download or read book Brown Saviors and Their Others written by Arjun Shankar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Brown Saviors and Their Others Arjun Shankar draws from his ethnographic work with an educational NGO to investigate the practices of “brown saviors”—globally mobile, dominant-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who drive India’s help economy. Shankar argues that these brown saviors actually reproduce many of the racialized values and ideologies associated with who and how to help that have been passed down from the colonial period, while masking other operations of power behind the racial politics of global brownness. In India, these operations of power center largely on the transnational labor politics of caste. Ever attentive to moments of discomfort and complicity, Shankar develops a method of “nervous ethnography” to uncover the global racial hierarchies, graded caste stratifications, urban/rural distinctions, and digital panaceas that shape the politics of help in India. Through nervous critique, Shankar introduces a framework for the study of the global help economies that reckons with the ongoing legacies of racial and caste capitalism.
Download or read book Your Computer Is on Fire written by Thomas S. Mullaney and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Techno-utopianism is dead: Now is the time to pay attention to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems. This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley-led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix--and control--society. Contributors Janet Abbate, Ben Allen, Paul N. Edwards, Nathan Ensmenger, Mar Hicks, Halcyon M. Lawrence, Thomas S. Mullaney, Safiya Umoja Noble, Benjamin Peters, Kavita Philip, Sarah T. Roberts, Sreela Sarkar, Corinna Schlombs, Andrea Stanton, Mitali Thakor, Noah Wardrip-Fruin
