[Air-L] Call, 4S, Toronto, Open Panel: Worker-led Techno-futures

[Rafael Do Nascimento Grohmann]

Hey AoIR,

The 4S Conference will be here in Toronto this year, October 7-10, and I’m organizing an open panel on Worker-led Techno-futures. I would like to invite you to read the abstract below and submit a 250-word abstract by April 30. There are also many other excellent panels that have been accepted, which you can check on the 4S website.

https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php

Worker-Led Techno-Futures
Organizer: Rafael Grohmann

Whether through social movements, labor unions, cooperatives, or solidarity-based collective arrangements, workers are actively imagining and configuring techno-futures from their own vantage points. This open panel investigates how workers globally are reclaiming agency to design and govern sociotechnical systems. It focuses on worker-led processes of imagining, designing, maintaining, and regulating technologies and infrastructures. We are especially interested in the frictions of practice: the sociotechnical challenges workers face, the failures and breakdowns that accompany experimentation, and the ways worker-governed projects confront technopower in workplaces, markets, and other places. How do worker-led initiatives prefigure alternative techno-futures, and where do they encounter limits? This open panel invites paper proposals that analyze worker-led techno-futures through STS frameworks, including (but not limited to) labor and infrastructure studies, co-design and participatory methods, feminist STS, intersectionality, decolonial and Indigenous STS, platform cooperativism and digital solidarity economies. It encourages submissions that explore the following inquiries: What sociotechnical systems are workers building, repurposing, reappropriating, hacking, or refusing? How do worker collectives organize co-design, maintenance, and decision-making over time? What are the sociotechnical challenges, frictions, and failures inherent in these worker-led technologies? What values are embedded in worker-led technologies (e.g., solidarity, care, sociotechnical justice), and how are these values negotiated in practice? Which workers are involved in building these technologies, and what forms of participation do they enact? Which techno-futures are they prefiguring and how are they dealing with technopower? We welcome contributions from diverse geographic contexts and disciplinary backgrounds, and we particularly encourage submissions that highlight underrepresented voices and Majority World perspectives.

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See you in Toronto! Beyond the event, of course, I’ll also be hosting an unforgettable karaoke party themed around workers with LED, techno, and futures.

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://criticaldigitalmethods.ca/creative-labour-critical-futures/>

Researcher, AI Policy Observatory for the World of Work<https://www.essex.ac.uk/research-projects/ai-policy-observatory-for-the-world-of-work>
Senior Fellow, Massey College<https://www.masseycollege.ca/>

Faculty Affiliate, Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society<https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/>  <https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/>