Infrastructures and Imaginaries: Reproducing Workers in the Platform Economy

The JHI working group “Theories and Praxis of Digital Labour: The fault lines in digital capitalism” is excited to invite you to the public talk by Dr. Kylie Jarrett.

Feminist scholars and activists, especially those shaped by the Marxist feminist tradition, have long argued that more attention be paid to the reproduction of workers, especially within domestic contexts. Drawing on this position and the approach of social reproduction theory, this paper will argue for the importance of investigating work beyond the point of production in order to more fully appreciate the conditions of possibility for digital labour. Using platform work as a focus, this paper will explore how workers are reproduced as workers, describing the role of various reproductive apparatus, such as physical environments and policy contexts, in constituting this form of labour in the Irish context. In particular, it will highlight how various social infrastructures - some situated in the realm of the imaginary and the affective - serve as vital shapers of the nature of platform work, the specific experiences of workers, and their survival and resistance strategies. In doing so, it will emphasise the need to situate workers in these - supposedly - non-economic social, cultural, and interpersonal relations in our approaches to examining and critiquing the platform economy.

Biography: Kylie Jarrett is Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. She is author of Digital Labor (2022) and Feminism, Labour, and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (2016) and co-author of NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (2019) and Google and the Culture of Search (2013). She is also editor of the new journal Dialogues in Digital Society.