[Air-L] Book Talk, Work in the Digital Media and Entertainment Industries

[Rafael Do Nascimento Grohmann]

Hi AoIR,

Happy New Year!

I would like to invite you to the first 2025 DigiLabour book talk, on our YouTube channel<https://youtube.com/digilabour>. The guest is Tanner Mirrlees (Ontario Tech), who recently launched his new book, Work in the Digital Media and Entertainment Industries: A Critical Introduction<https://www.routledge.com/Work-in-the-Digital-Media-and-Entertainment-Industries-A-Critical-Introduction/Mirrlees/p/book/9780367673758>

This will take place on Jan 14, 4PM ET through this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XVLFCNNRwY

Book Description
This book is a first-of-its-kind critical interdisciplinary introduction to the economic, political, cultural, and technological dimensions of work in the rapidly growing digital media and entertainment industries (DMEI). Tanner Mirrlees presents a comprehensive guide to understanding the key contexts, theories, methods, debates, and struggles surrounding work in the DMEI. Packed with current examples and accessible research findings, the book highlights the changing conditions and experiences of work in the DMEI. It surveys the DMEI’s key sectors and occupations and considers the complex intersections between labor and social power relations of class, gender, and race, as well as tensions between creativity and commerce, freedom and control, meritocracy and hierarchy, and precarity and equity, diversity, and inclusivity. Chapters also explore how work in the DMEI is being reshaped by capitalism and corporations, government and policies, management, globalization, platforms, A.I., and worker collectives such as unions and cooperatives. This book is a critical introduction to this growing area of research, teaching, learning, life, labor, and organizing, with an eye to understanding work in the DMEI and changing it, for the better. Offering a broad overview of the field, this textbook is an indispensable resource for instructors, undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars.

Table of Contents
Introduction: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About “Being Creative” and Love the “Labour Turn”  1. What is Work? Meanings, Matters, Motivations  2. What are the Digital Media and Entertainment Industries (DMEI)? 15 Convergent Industry Groups, Central to Modern Work in the Digital Society  3. What is Research on Work in the DMEI? A Toolkit for Labor Theory and Method  4. What is Capitalism and How Do Corporations Shape Work in the DMEI?  5. What is the State and How Does it Govern Work in the DMEI? Explicit and Tacit Labor Laws, Policies, and Regulations  6. What is the Management of Work in the DMEI? Putting Leadership Power, Decision-Making Power, Soft Power, Hard Power, and Market Power to Work On Workers  7. Is Meritocracy at Work in the DMEI? Intersectionality and Inequality, with Distinction  8. What is the Globalization of Work in the DMEI? Outsourced Hardware, Software, Content and Service  9. What is the Platformization of Work in the DMEI? Online Creators, Cultural Producers and Influencers  10. What is the Automation of Work in the DMEI?  Generative AI and / as Labor Saving Technologies (LSTs)  11. Is Work in the DMEI ‘Free’? Advertising, Audience Commodities, Social Media Users, Brand Loyal Fans, Crowdsourced Task-Takers, Interns and Athletes  12. What Are Workers Doing to Make the DMEI’s Future of Work Better for All? Collective Action  13. Postscript: Not “Being Creative”: For a Study of Work in the DMEI, Post-“Creative Exceptionalism”

Feel free to spread the word!

See you there!

best,

Rafael





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dr. Rafael Grohmann

Assistant Professor of Media Studies

Department of Arts, Culture and Media<https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/acm/rafael-grohmann>

Faculty of Information<https://ischool.utoronto.ca/profile/rafael-grohmann/>

University of Toronto

Leader, DigiLabour<https://digilabour.com.br/>
Research Associate, University of Oxford<https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/rafael-grohmann/>

Founding Editor, Platforms & Society<https://journals.sagepub.com/home/PNS>

Principal Investigator, Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP)<https://digilabour.com.br/worker-owned-intersectional-platforms-woip/>

Co-Lead, Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF)<https://dhn.utoronto.ca/cdhi-members-launch-creative-labour-and-critical-futures/>


2024-2025 Faculty Fellow,  Queer and Trans Research Lab, Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto<https://sds.utoronto.ca/qtrl-cohort-2024-25/>