Crisis, Rupture and Structural Change: Re-imagining Global Learning and Engagement While Staying in Place During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented closures of national borders and the withdrawal of much of the social and cultural activities of society into the walls of the home. For us, educators focused on global engagement and analyzing international law and society, the abrupt retreat into the shelter of domestic walls disrupted the very subjects we were studying—inside and outside the classroom. In the pandemic’s first wave, most study abroad and international experiential programs were cancelled indefinitely, and the programs that continued had to operate in an environment of social distancing and uncertainty. We were forced to scramble to accommodate the needs of our students who were suddenly sent home or had travel plans cancelled. At the same time, the global nature of this and other ongoing crises (from humanitarian emergencies that spill across borders to the global impacts of climate change) underscored the need to prepare students for a future where both cross-border crises and the need for international collaboration and education will be heightened. These developments also highlighted the need for a variety of meaningful virtual alternatives for students to acquire the critical skills and knowledge needed to succeed in global and cross-cultural environments. Against this backdrop, in late spring 2020 we turned our focus to developing a course to turn the COVID-19 crisis itself into a virtual international learning opportunity. We aimed to utilize the shared experience of living through a pandemic that was now a global crisis as a starting point for the exploration of global perspectives and responses to crisis, and as a vantage point to help students link their current challenges and experiences to the impact of pandemic in the societies where they had planned to travel for work or study. Isolated in our homes with our own public and domestic lives collapsing and colliding, we aimed to create global connections by creating a space where we and our students could connect the ruptures created by the current crisis to the ruptures and reshaping of perspectives, world views, and personal trajectories that is the hallmark of a transformative global or intercultural encounter. Our goal was to deepen students’ empathetic, contemplative, and communication skills—critical components of global experiential education—while drawing upon literature and pedagogy in these areas and employing experiential learning techniques. The rise of protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement in the middle of the course added a new dimension to our plan and served as a catalyst for both ourselves and our students to move beyond the original course goals and metrics, and to utilize our experiences living through a crisis as to explore how individuals and societies create and grapple with structural change. Similarly, the clashes and re-drawing of lines between our homes, workplaces and classrooms created additional opportunities for connection and to replace reimaging our individual and collective futures. This reflective essay interrogates and records our goals, methods and experiences in creating this classroom space and pedagogical experience during a period of crisis. Ultimately, it memorializes how the experience of developing and teaching this course during the COVID-19 pandemic itself also served as a crucible that reflected the pressures of the pandemic experience, and how our attempts to catalyze change and global engagement for our students were transformative for our own professional and personal trajectories

On the Margins of the Machine: Heteromation and Robotics

Growing interest in robotics in policy and professional circles promises a future where machines will perform many of the social and institutional functions that have traditionally belonged to human beings. This promise is based on the unexamined premise that robots can act autonomously, without much support from their human users. Close examination of current social robots, however, introduces a different image, where human labor is critically needed for any meaningful operation of these systems. Such labor is normally unacknowledged and made invisible in media and academic portrayals of robotic systems. We take issue with this erasure, and seek to bring human labor to the fore. Drawing on the concept of “heteromation,” we illustrate the indispensible role of human labor in the functioning of many of the existing technological systems. Given current uncertainties in the robotic design space, we explore various scenarios for the future development of these systems, and the different ways by which they might unfold.ye

Big Data, Bigger Dilemmas: A Critical Review

The recent interest in Big Data has generated a broad range of new academic, corporate, and policy practices along with an evolving debate among its proponents, detractors, and skeptics. While the practices draw on a common set of tools, techniques, and technologies, most contributions to the debate come either from a particular disciplinary perspective or with a focus on a domain-specific issue. A close examination of these contributions reveals a set of common problematics that arise in various guises and in different places. It also demonstrates the need for a critical synthesis of the conceptual and practical dilemmas surrounding Big Data. The purpose of this article is to provide such a synthesis by drawing on relevant writings in the sciences, humanities, policy, and trade literature. In bringing these diverse literatures together, we aim to shed light on the common underlying issues that concern and affect all of these areas. By contextualizing the phenomenon of Big Data within larger socioeconomic developments, we also seek to provide a broader understanding of its drivers, barriers, and challenges. This approach allows us to identify attributes of Big Data that require more attention—autonomy, opacity, generativity, disparity, and futurity—leading to questions and ideas for moving beyond dilemmas

Network Organizations: Symmetric Cooperation or Multivalent Negotiation?

The network model of organization plays a central role in recent sociological accounts of the information economy. This model is also often presented in organization and information and communication technologies (ICT) literature with an air of enthusiasm that underscores its advantages--flexibility, cooperative culture, innovativeness, and knowledge and technology intensity. Such themes are usually based on a "networking logic" that assumes the trustful cooperation of large and small production firms in a rapidly changing economic environment. We believe that both the logic and the themes based upon it are too narrow to be able to explain the complex dimensions of interorganizational networking. Using Enron as a case study, our goal in this article is to enrich the logic just described and to develop an extended model of the network enterprise. We argue that this is only possible by extending the unit of analysis beyond the production firm, to include, among others, subsidiaries, banks, investors, auditors, and government agencies. The proposed extended model allows the broadening of many of the aforementioned themes, making it possible to arrive at a realistic picture of the complexities of the network enterprise. The managerial advantages of the model are also discussed

How IT Mediates Organizations: Enron and the California Energy Crisis

Market activity, understood as the outcome of arms-length interactions among calculative agents, often involves asymmetries due to the capability of some agents to impose events, actions, and relations that others have to take into account. Information and communication technologies are playing an increasingly significant role in amplifying such capability, and to explain this role we need frameworks that take agents as entangled within the web of relations and connections that make it possible for them to mobilize technologies along with other allies such as people and organizations. Actor-network theory (ANT) is such a framework. The paper applies ANT to the study of Enron's involvement in California's energy market. It will show, from a social-informatics perspective, how technology was variously used, both as an intra- and extra-organizational device, to proliferate links, to enroll allies, to make image, and to amplify Enron's role in the energy market. In short, the paper will argue that IT mediated Enron in more than one way

Keynes’s Grandchildren and Marx’s Gig Workers: Why Human Labor Still Matters

The current anxiety around the globe about automation and “the future of work,” the irrelevance of human labor, and the superfluity of human beings is based on a set of recurring ideas about technology, work, and economic value. Not quite novel, these ideas have been debated for a long time and by prominent thinkers such as Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. To grasp the current moment, therefore, it would be useful to revisit those debates and to understand them within the broader history of capitalism. We examine this history with a focus on labor and technology, bringing attention to the hidden forms of value creation in the current economy, as well as the blind spots of the historical debate

The Political Gig-Economy: Platformed Work and Labour

The notion of work and labor is changing as digital technologies do not only complement and substitute jobs but also decompose them into tasks coordinated by digital labor platforms. We call upon IS research to critically engage with the political economy of platforms and to study them as mechanisms for the extraction of value, distribution of wealth and power, as well as a particular relationship between humans and machines. To this effect, we explore potential conceptual avenues for such engagement by comparing the platforming of work and labor in the gig-economy with the division of labor found in the workshop and the factory. We conclude the distinct characteristics of the political economy of platforms marked by the hidden or invisible work and labor of participants, and new modes of extracting value from their participation