Join our lively discussion of directions for sociological work on prescient topics like AI, work automation, surveillance, digitization, algorithmic management, and platform work, as well as on the implications for inequality along lines of class, race/ethnicity, and gender.
DATE: Thursday, May 2, 2024
TIME: 10am-11am EST
Please contact the moderator for the Zoom link at argun@ku.edu.
PANELISTS:
Dr. Ya-Wen Lei, Harvard University. Her recent research focuses on work automation and augmentation, and on techno-state capitalism. Dr. Lei’s scholarship spans across political sociology, sociology work and labor, economic sociology, and science and technology studies. She is the lead of author of “Automation and Augmentation: AI, Robots, and Work,” Annual Review of Sociology (2024) and the author of “Delivering Solidarity: Platform Architecture and Collective Contention in China’s Platform Economy,” American Sociological Review (2021), “Upgrading China through Automation: Manufacturers, Workers and the Techno Developmental State,” Work, Employment and Society (2022), and The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2023).
Dr. Karen Levy, Cornell University. She researches how law and technology interact to regulate social life, with particular focus on social and organizational aspects of surveillance. Much of Dr. Levy’s research analyzes the uses of monitoring for social control in various contexts, from long-haul trucking to intimate relationships. She is also interested in how data collection uniquely impacts, and is contested by, marginalized populations. She is the author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace
Surveillance (Princeton University Press, 2023) and “Privacy Threats in Intimate Relationships,” Journal of Cybersecurity (2020)
Dr. Lindsey Cameron, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on how algorithmic management is changing the modern workplace, with an emphasis on the gig economy. Professor Cameron has an on-going, seven-year ethnography of the largest sector of the gig economy, the ride-hailing industry, examining how algorithmic management changes managerial control. She is the author of “The Making of the ‘Good Bad’ Job: How Algorithmic Management Repurposes Workplace Consent through Constant and Confined Choice,” Administrative Science Quarterly (2024), and “’Making out’ While Driving: Relational and Efficiency Games in the Gig Economy,” Organization Science (2022).
Dr. Benjamin Shestakofsky, University of Pennsylvania. His research centers on the relationship between work, technology, organizations, and political economy. Some of his recent projects examine the hidden workers who support AI systems, the governance of digital platforms, and how venture capital affects organizational culture and change in the tech industry. He is the author of Behind the Startup How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality (University of California Press, 2024), and co-author of “Making Platforms Work: Relationship Labor and the Management of Publics,” Theory and Society (2020).
Moderated by Dr. Argun Saatcioglu, University of Kansas
