[Air-L] AAG 2020 Call for papers: Digital Work in the Planetary Market

[Mark Graham]

*Call for papers: Digital Work in the Planetary Market
<https://geonet.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/call-for-papers-digital-work-in-the-planetary-market-aag-2020/>*

Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers
<https://www2.aag.org/aagannualmeeting/>
Denver, Colorado
April 6-10, 2020

Session Organizers: Mark Graham, Fabian Ferrari

Work, and the networks that extract value from it, are increasingly
embedded into planetary systems. As ever more work is commodified and
traded beyond local labour markets, this session seeks to focus on those
systems that purport to pay little attention to the locations in which work
is done. Workers embedded into digital production networks produce
immaterial outputs. Those outputs can be instantly transmitted to anywhere
on the planet. This means that, for work that relies on the production and
processing of codified rather than tacit knowledge, proximity is no longer
needed between workers and the objects and subjects of their work.

For many, the fact that Amazon contractors in Romania listened to Alexa
conversations or that Facebook commissioned Indian workers to read private
messages has been a privacy scandal. Beyond privacy concerns, these cases
are exemplary of a planetary network of extracting cognitive human labour
that happens in real-time. Those developments reflect reshaped value chains
and skill requirements. For example, the increasing complexity of AI supply
chains dovetails with an increasing demand for high-quality training data
labelled by workers in the Global South. Work can now seemingly be
deterritorialised at a planetary scale.

The goal of this paper session is to remove some of the opacity of digital
work in the planetary market, inviting new theoretical frameworks,
methodological approaches, and innovative ways of visualising research
findings. Papers in it might address the following questions:

   - What do the global value chains of trans-national networks of machines
   and digital workers look like? How do we theorise the ways that they are
   governed and take form?
   - What do digital production networks that fuse automated systems and
   human production do to create value; and, despite their seeming
   immateriality, how do they use and create economic geographies?
   - What are the infrastructures that mediate, augment, and extract value
   from digital work?
   - How should we understand the relative embedded- and disembedded,
   material and immaterial, and territorialised and deterritorialised natures
   of digital production?
   - How should we theorise the politics of technological artefacts within
   the rise of planetary networks of computing?
   - How do we apply infrastructural thinking to holistically studying the
   actually existing economic geographies of AI design, training and
   augmentation? In other words, how should we think about the conjunction of
   innovations in deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision,
   and autonomous vehicles with the planetary networks of computing and
   digital production that they rely on to function?
   - What are the economic geographies of globally-traded digital work?
   What are the ways in which the materiality of digital work is concealed and
   who benefits from doing so?
   - What are the relationships between the increasing commodification and
   the disembedding of digital work?
   - What does it mean to work in an international digital production
   network, what possibilities do workers, in opaque networks of digital
   production, have to decommodify and improve the conditions under which they
   work?

If you are interested in participating in this paper session, please send a
title and 250-word abstract *by Wednesday, October 9th* to Mark Graham (
mark.graham at oii.ox.ac.uk) and Fabian Ferrari (fabian.ferrari at oii.ox.ac.uk).
------------------------------------------
Mark Graham

Professor of Internet Geography
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
@geoplace <http://twitter.com/geoplace> | markgraham.space

New publications:

Graham, M. (ed). 2019. Digital Economies at Global Margins
<https://www.idrc.ca/en/book/digital-economies-global-margins>. Cambridge
MA: MIT Press.

Graham, M., and Anwar, M. A. 2019. The Global Gig Economy: Towards a
Planetary Labour Market?
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220388.2018.1554208> First
Monday. 24(4).  doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i4.9913.
<http://twitter.com/geoplace>