[Air-L] 4S 2017 CfP: Techno-jobs and Capital

[Norma Möllers]

*** apologies for cross-posting***

*Call for papers: Annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of 
Science (4S)*

Boston, MA, USA, Aug 30-Sep 2 2017*
*

Submission deadline: March 1, 2017 through the conference system 
(https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s17/)

Feel free to contact us if you consider submitting to our panel.

*Panel 126. Techno-Jobs and Capital*

Organizers: Winifred Poster, Washington University (wrposter at gmail.com); 
Norma Möllers, Queen’s University (norma.mollers at queensu.ca)

STS has a long tradition of inquiring about techno-work and providing 
foundations for studies of locality, partiality, contingency, and 
agency.  Less attention is paid to the connections of techno-jobs to the 
systems of political economy in which they are embedded.  The goal of 
this track is to encourage explicit discussion of the ways these new 
jobs are shaped by and sustain capital, and how they relate to broader 
shifts in the organization of labor and workers. We emphasize how this 
applies to both elite and subordinate types of techno-labor.  It 
includes high-status jobs like the entrepreneurs and evangelists who 
market and distribute technical products for firms and nations, software 
coders who are bound by corporate non-compete contracts, techno-venture 
firms that are scrutinized for under-employing women, high-tech 
developers that rely on immigrant labor and the ‘body shopping’ 
practices of intermediary contracting firms, etc. It also includes a 
growing sector of middle and low status workers like the data janitors 
who clean up the internet, senior citizen ‘workampers’ who travel in 
their RV’s to labor at Amazon.com warehouses, manual workers who dispose 
of our phones and laptops, etc. We welcome papers that engage issues 
such as: transnational and post-colonial labor dynamics; techno-venture 
capitalists; R&D labor; crowdsourcing and micro-labor; outsourcing; 
sharing economies; creative, media, and game labor; automation; bot 
labor; algorithmic controls of labor; consumer labor; maintenance, 
repair, and care; labors of techno-waste and breakdown; racialized, 
gender, queer, and (dis)abled inequalities of technical labor; and 
digital strategies within the labor movement.