[Air-L] 4S 2019 Open Panel: Emotional Labor and Care Work in Gig Economy Systems

[Nemer, David]

Hello all!

Austin Toombs (Purdue University) and I (David Nemer, University of
Kentucky) are putting together an open panel on Emotional Labor and Care
Work in Gig Economy System for the 4S 2019 conference in New Orleans.
Description is below. We encourage you to apply and spread the word. Don't
hesitate to reach out and ask questions! (
https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s19/)

185. Uncovering Emotional Labor and Care Work in Gig Economy Systems

David Nemer, University of Kentucky
Austin Tooms, Purdue University

The gig-economy is typically understood to comprise two forms of work:
crowdwork, e.g., Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower, and work-on-demand via
app, e.g. Airbnb and Uber. These platforms connect an indefinite number of
organizations, individuals, clients, and workers both locally and globally.
While workers are compensated for the services they provide, these
platforms also profit from the immaterial labor that workers must engage
in, uncompensated and often undefined, in order to provide their customers
with a high standard of service and receive commensurate ratings. This
“immaterial labor”—that is, all those aspects of labor relations that go
beyond the material aspects of work and production—is obfuscated by the
platforms and the sociotechnical systems in which those platforms are
embedded. In this panel we focus on two feminist interpretations of
immaterial labor that have attracted the interest of the STS community:
Emotional Labor, which is the management of personal feeling that requires
one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the proper outward
countenance for others’ sake; and Care Work, which in gig-economy settings
can include the often-unrecognized work related to providing or
facilitating others’ comfort, such as through offering amenities,
recommendations, unique experiences, cleaning, and more. We invite papers
that explore such approaches on gig-economy platforms and help us
understand how emotional labor and care work are entangled with the
successes of these platforms, while also necessarily downplayed or made
hidden within the surrounding sociotechnical system.

Thanks!
-- 
*David Nemer, PhD*
Assistant Professor
School of Information Science
University of Kentucky
http://dnemer.com <http://www.dnemer.com/>

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