Worker-Centered Design: Expanding HCI Methods for Supporting Labor

HCI has long considered sites of workplace collaboration. From airline cockpits to distributed groupware systems, scholars emphasize the importance of supporting a multitude of tasks and creating technologies that integrate into collaborative work settings. More recent scholarship highlights a growing need to consider the concerns of workers within and beyond established workplace settings or roles of employment, from steelworkers whose jobs have been eliminated with post-industrial shifts in the economy to contractors performing the content moderation that shapes our social media experiences. This one-day workshop seeks to bring together a growing community of HCI scholars concerned with the labor upon which the future of work we envision relies. We will discuss existing methods for studying work that we find both productive and problematic, with the aim of understanding how we might better bridge current gaps in research, policy, and practice. Such conversations will focus on the challenges associated with taking a worker-oriented approach and outline concrete methods and strategies for conducting research on labor in changing industrial, political, and environmental contexts

Expanding the Boundaries of Food Policy: The Turn to Equity in New York City

Policymakers acknowledge that the food system is multidimensional and that social determinants affect diet-related health outcomes, yet cities have emphasized programs and policies narrowly connected to food access and nutritional health. Over the past fifteen years, the boundaries of food governance have expanded to include a wider range of issues and domains not previously considered within the purview of food policy, like labor, housing, and education policies. This paper illustrates the processes by which this shift occurs by presenting the case of New York City, which has broadened its food governance to a larger set of issues, requiring cross-sectoral initiatives that have led to a more expansive notion of food policy. This shift has resulted from an increased political salience of income inequality and poverty, and a change in municipal leadership that led to a greater emphasis on equity and social justice. Efforts to address equity affected the food system, and in turn led to diverse policies that have expanded the boundaries of food policy. The paper traces this evolution and outlines the implications of these findings for food governance and future urban food policy development and research

Mutualism as Market Practice: An examination of market performativity in the context of anarchism and its implications for post-capitalist politics

This article interrogates the performative effects of mutualist ideas in the context of market- making. Mutualism is a variety of anarchism associated with the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who argued for the centrality of market exchanges and mutual credit as a means for emancipating workers from capitalist exploitation. The discussion is informed by an ethnographic inquiry within a Local Exchange Trading System in Spain - the Moneda Social Puma - which illustrates how actors put mutualist ideas to work. This research makes three contributions: first, it frames a view of market multiplicity and plasticity that broadens the current scope of market studies beyond a managerialist focus. Second, it reveals how actors mobilise anarchist theories to shape – rather than escape – markets. Third, this work elucidates how actors negotiate and stabilise conflicting forms of valuation as mutualist ideas are implemented. In particular, we draw attention to a set of infrastructural practices and mutual credit arrangements whereby the market is cooperatively managed as a common. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of our work for extant debates concerning post-capitalist politics, markets and anarchism

Disrupting technologies:can the planetary technosphere be steered politically toward a post-capitalist metabolism?

The dominant approach in (trans/sub)national governance of ecological crises, mostnotably climate change, is ecological modernisation. As a framing of collectiveaction, ecological modernisation assumes that the structure of economic growth canbe made sustainable by deploying market instruments to drive the sociotechnicaltransition away from the present fossil-fueled technological base. However, scientistsare warning that such a market-driven technology-frst approach, ensconced inthe UNFCCC since at least the Kyoto Protocol, might not be comprehensive andrapid enough to prevent global warming beyond 2°C above the pre-industrial levelsand thus a signifcant breakdown of ecosystems, rendering vulnerable indigenous,low-income, and working-class communities across the world.This thesis analyses how organisations that are operating in the “middle ground,”between the policymaking arena and their social constituencies, are seeking todisrupt the hegemony of technology-frst policies, while at the same time proposingalternative pathways to transition away from the extractivist and capitalist socialmetabolism to a plurality of environmentally livable and socially just futures for all.Taking an iterative theory-building approach, the thesis frst conceptualises thestrategic agency of these social actors: against the historical trajectory of industrialcapitalist social metabolism; within the power-diferentiated social structures of thecapitalist state; and through the framing and distributive struggles sited betweenthe climate action arena and the social feld. By drawing on a set of complementarytheories — ecological Marxism, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, the critical theory of technology, strategic-relational approach, andinstitutional logics theory — it proposes two analytical frameworks to indicatestrategic openings for “middle-ground” organisations to impact sociotechnical andsociometabolic transitions.In a second step, the thesis provides two case studies contrasting two organisations and two environmentalisms: a degrowth-oriented Institute for Political Ecology,hailing from the periphery of European capitalism; and a green new deal-orientedindustrial trade union Unite the Union, hailing from one of the centres of Europeancapitalism. Drawing on interviews, analysis of documents, and joint research withthe two organisations, it argues that they engage the governance terrain as epistemicactors and work with diferent social constituencies to instil distributive justice into climate action. These actors are disrupting the dominant market-driven technologyfrst approach and are thereby re-politicising and re-democratising the environmentalgovernance. In a fnal step, the thesis analyses and speculates on the prospects oftheir counter-proposals in the present political and environmental conjuncture.<br/

Sharing the liberal utopia. The case of Uber in France and the US

This article takes the case of Uber, a global platform specialized in transport technologies, to reappraise the claims of the sharing economy. The case presents a chronology of the struggles over the regulation of these digital markets in the US and France, using Uber's self-description and web discourse for additional illustrative purposes. It exposes Uber's business model, the key driving actors and their strategies as well as multi-scalar counter movements. The analysis is framed from a Hayekian and a Polanyian perspective, and the potential of the sharing economy to go beyond market fundamentalism. The Polanyian utopia of sharing as more than market relations based on self-interest is mobilized for legitimizing the platform. The Hayekian utopia of a market society which transforms social relations of friendship and community service into market activities is describing actual development. Finally, Polanyian "counter movements" are described and their potentials are discussed.Series: SRE - Discussion Paper

'You are you and the app. There's nobody else.': Building Worker-Designed Data Institutions within Platform Hegemony

Information asymmetries create extractive, often harmful relationships between platform workers (e.g., Uber or Deliveroo drivers) and their algorithmic managers. Recent HCI studies have put forward more equitable platform designs but leave open questions about the social and technical infrastructures required to support them without the cooperation of platforms. We conducted a participatory design study in which platform workers deconstructed and re-imagined Uber's schema for driver data. We analyzed the data structures and social institutions participants proposed, focusing on the stakeholders, roles, and strategies for mitigating conflicting interests of privacy, personal agency, and utility. Using critical theory, we reflected on the capability of participatory design to generate bottom-up collective data infrastructures. Based on the plurality of alternative institutions participants produced and their aptitude to navigate data stewardship decisions, we propose user-configurable tools for lightweight data institution building, as an alternative to redesigning existing platforms or delegating control to centralized trusts

No woman's land:Feminist approaches to the ride-hailing sector and digital labor platforms in India

In this dissertation, I investigate the concerns, issues and opportunities for platform labor reform with a focus on the ride-hailing sector using Bardzell (2010)’s feminist lens. The feminist viewpoint keeps the marginal user at the center committing to equity, diversity, identity, empowerment, and social justice to improve the work conditions of gig workers in the Global South. By conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with the different stakeholders of the ride-hailing sector, and analysing case studies, media coverage, policy papers, and research reports, I suggest guidelines for redesigning the digital labor platforms

No woman's land:Feminist approaches to the ride-hailing sector and digital labor platforms in India

In this dissertation, I investigate the concerns, issues and opportunities for platform labor reform with a focus on the ride-hailing sector using Bardzell (2010)’s feminist lens. The feminist viewpoint keeps the marginal user at the center committing to equity, diversity, identity, empowerment, and social justice to improve the work conditions of gig workers in the Global South. By conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with the different stakeholders of the ride-hailing sector, and analysing case studies, media coverage, policy papers, and research reports, I suggest guidelines for redesigning the digital labor platforms