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Platform Workers’ Organizing Diaries: Messages from Union Organizers to Researchers

 Javed Siddiqui, Abdul Nayeem, Ambika Tandon, Anushree Gupta, Eesha Kunduri, Isha Bhallamudi, Manju Goel  August 3, 2026

यह सामग्री हिंदी में भी उपलब्ध है।

ಈ ವಿಷಯವು ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿಯೂ ಲಭ್ಯವಿದೆ.

ఈ కంటెంట్ తెలుగులో కూడా అందుబాటులో ఉంది.

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This article is the fifth post in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network . Read the introduction to the series here, the second post in the series here, the third post here and the fourth post here. Collectivization, unionization, and resistance by platform workers form prominent themes in emerging scholarship on platform work, with exciting new collaborations taking place between researchers, platform workers, and gig worker unions. As more researchers join these ranks, we are attentive to the risks of research fatigue and exhaustion faced by gig workers and organizers, who receive numerous requests for interviews and other forms of data collection. When practiced non-extractively, this space opens up possibilities for researchers to collaborate and co-create resources that are useful to unions and workers in their mission to win basic work rights and establish dignity of work. (read more...)

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Automating Language, Losing Relationality: Feminist Reflections on African Language AI

 Mpho Primus, Siri Lamoureaux  July 28, 2026

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A grandmother pauses before answering a child. The meaning of her words lies not only in the words themselves, but in tone, shared history, the relationship between speaker and listener, the setting, and even the silence that precedes the response. None of these become part of the training data for today’s large language models (LLMs). (read more...)

The Hotspot as a Sociotechnical and Political Object: Frontline Healthcare Professionals and Public Conversation alongside the Intensification of a U.S. Measles Outbreak

 Katharina Rynkiewich  July 24, 2026

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John Snow’s 19th century dot-map (from the series introduction) is representative of a shift in the public management of infectious diseases towards measuring density of confirmed cases within a geographic region. This practice is referred to in epidemiology as spatial clustering and as “hotspots” more colloquially. Today’s outbreak investigations use visual representations of disease spread as a standard practice. Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 tracker was one such communicative tool for showing the intensification of an outbreak across space and time. The visual becomes representative of a more than normal number of confirmed cases in spatial and temporal balance, to allow the viewer to identify what we reference as hotspots. In what follows, I will examine the utility of the term hotspots through an investigation into the public discussion of the current United States measles outbreaks (2024—) put in contrast with the localized practice of frontline healthcare professionals in South Florida. I will show how hotspots have meaning beyond their colloquial uptake as clear and accurate representations of who is getting sick. (read more...)

Stuck Among the Trees

 Sumin Myung  July 22, 2026

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This article is a part of a series about stuckness in science and technology. Read the introduction to the series here. On a sunny day in November 2021, I was taking a walk with two forest scientists, Junho and Minho (pseudonyms). Junho was then working as a junior researcher at a premier research institution in South Korea, whereas Minho was a Ph.D. candidate at a university lab. During my fieldwork with forest scientists from 2017 to 2023, I frequently encountered growing expectations that new field technologies—drones, high-resolution satellite sensors, or LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) devices—would replace some of the traditional fieldwork components that depended on diameter tapes, calipers, hypsometers, or increment coring. For many younger scientists, these field techniques were considered notoriously time-consuming, toilsome, and costly. While many of my interlocutors called such expectations a “hype,” Junho and Minho, as technophiles both in their early 30s, were excited about the introduction of such technologies to their fields. (read more...)

Charting the (Dis)course of Nature Restoration: The EU Nature Restoration Law in the Public Sphere in Czechia

 Abhigya  July 20, 2026

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The EU Nature Restoration Legislation was finally adopted in 2024, after going through the rounds of the EU parliament since 2022. The passing of the law marks a key moment in the EU’s pursuit of the European Green Deal, adopted in 2019. The European Green Deal is the EU’s growth strategy aimed at putting EU on the path to a green transition, with the ultimate goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2050. The ambitious Nature Restoration Legislation is expected to provide legal instruments to facilitate the restoration of declining ecosystems across the European Union. It supports some of the key goals of the biodiversity pillar of the Green Deal (the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030), akin to how the European Climate Law (Regulation (EU) 2021/1119) sets legally binding climate neutrality targets for the member states. Some of the measures outlined in the regulation include supporting sustainable agriculture, greening cities and towns, protecting pollinators, and restoring wetlands and rivers. (read more...)

Digital Porosity and Value in Suspension: Informal Economies and Video Games

 Iván Flores  July 16, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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When a video game development company creates a skin, a character, or a bundle of digital items, it is not merely producing aesthetics or playable experiences—it is also building an entire economic system: it defines a virtual currency, sets an exchange rate, and organizes a circuit of value. Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends (LoL), does not sell items directly; instead, it offers Riot Points (RP) as an intermediary currency. This move—currency and rate—drives the formal economy. (read more...)

The Monsters We Buried: Plastics, Swamp Men, and the Unquiet Ground of Deonar

 Adwaita Banerjee  July 14, 2026

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It is a winter day. Workers at the dump are busy emptying trucks, sweating profusely as the sun beats down on all of us. The smell of the freshly arrived waste grows worse in the heat. I have come to the dumping ground to meet Shivam, a municipal officer deputed there to supervise the workers. (read more...)

Is Edtech’s Stuckness a Kind of Fixation?

 Martin Oliver, Jade Vu Henry  July 9, 2026

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This article is a part of a series about stuckness in science and technology. Read the introduction to the series here. If you are one of the millions of people who have watched Sal Khan’s recent TED talk, you might think AI is poised to rescue struggling education systems all over the world. The UK government certainly seemed to agree when it announced that it was investing £2m to develop an AI lesson-planning tool for teachers, describing this project as “…a perfect example of the revolutionary benefits this technology can bring.” We, like other critical scholars of “EdTech” (see Macgilchrist, 2021), are not convinced. (read more...)