Category: Beyond the Academy

Transnational Translations: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Platforms and Labor

Malcolm Katrak, Anushree Gupta, Debopriya Shome February 18, 2026
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This article is the third 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, and the second post in the series here. As the landscape of technology-mediated work has evolved rapidly over the years, spanning across diverse geographical contexts, a wide range of academic disciplines, knowledges, and expertise have become relevant for engaging with the technopolitics surrounding it. The multidimensional and dynamic expansion of digital platforms into yet newer industries and sectors, through the use of novel technological and institutional forms, has made interdisciplinary approaches for the critical study of technology and society indispensable for grounding technological innovation in contextual realities. Moreover, intricately entangled global supply chains in the age of hyper-financialized technocapitalism restage labor politics as industry and work are restructured.  (read more...)

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Writing About/With Platform Unions: The Role of Culture, Politics, and History

Ambika Tandon, Debopriya Shome, Kaveri Medappa January 28, 2026
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This article is the second 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. This post offers a worm’s-eye view of the tensions and opportunities shaping platform labour organising in contemporary India. Platform work has exposed larger numbers of workers, especially younger workers with little memory or experience of organizing, to mobilize against capital and to do so using innovative means and campaigns (Wadikar, 2025). Building upon literature on platform workers’ mobilization in India (Ray and John, 2025), we highlight how efforts to organize emerge within regionally specific terrains of culture, politics and histories of labour mobilization. Through three vignettes, we bring the everyday together with the cultural, political histories and contexts of three metropolitan Indian cities – Bengaluru, Delhi and Kolkata, cities in which we have lived and engaged in research and activism with platform workers. Spanning between 2019 and 2025, these vignettes reflect the political landscape in India. They shed light on the capital–state nexus that limits the power of workers, unionization efforts built on foundations of loyalty and often exclusionary hypermasculine politics. What are the tensions and contradictions that we confronted while doing research with ‘gig’ worker unions? How do we navigate making certain aspects of unionizing visible while muting others? How can we be less extractive and more useful to the workers we write about? (read more...)

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Series Introduction: The Politics of Writing About Platform Workers’ Organizing

Isha Bhallamudi, Anushree Gupta November 4, 2025
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We are a group of scholars and researchers who work with gig and platform worker unions in India in various capacities. We form the India chapter of the Labor Tech Research Network collective, and have been meeting regularly from across the globe to share cross-sectoral organizing strategies, track the political landscape around gig & platform unions, and discuss research and reflections from our place-based engagements. Our work sits at the critical intersection of scholarship and activism. It involves amplifying workers’ voices, supporting unionisation efforts, and supporting workers in their struggles to lead more dignified and just working lives. Our discussions have inspired us to put together this blog series on the politics of writing about platform workers’ organizing. (read more...)

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Trade versus Academic Press: Part 2 of Publishing in Academia

Savannah Mandel October 22, 2024
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Publishing is confusing and complicated. There are often barriers to understanding it fully. And the process is very rarely fully transparent. So, I’m sharing my experiences of the publishing process, and talk about why I, as a PhD student in STS, chose to go with a trade publisher over an academic one when my book went to auction. This is Part 2 of a series on publishing in academia. In Part 1 of this series I describe how I got my agent, and discuss whether or not academics need agents. (read more...)

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Do Academics Need Agents?: Part 1 of Publishing in Academia

Savannah Mandel October 15, 2024
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Publishing is confusing and complicated. There are often barriers to understanding it fully. And the process is very rarely fully transparent. So, I’m sharing my experiences of the publishing process, how I got my agent, and discuss whether or not academics need agents. “Do Academics Need Agents?” is Part 1 of a series on publishing in academia. In Part 2 of this series, I talk about why I, as a PhD student in STS, chose to go with a trade publisher over an academic one when my book went to auction. (read more...)

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AI as a Feminist Issue

Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes September 5, 2023
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By choosing to look at the funding from the American Government on this field, I aim to tell a different story about AI. A quick search for the word “librarian” on Google reveals images upon images of women holding books amongst big shelves, attending to patrons, reading stories for children, or stocking book shelves. Librarian is one of those professions that, like many others, such as nurse and secretary, have been associated with the female world.  If this text is about AI, you might be asking why I’m writing about libraries and librarians–but as scholars Safyia Noble (2018) in her Algorithms of Oppression and Monica Westin (2023) more recently have shown, what most people in Western countries usually understand as the internet, and what fuels the data collection of digital information that feeds generative artificial intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT, was first started in the 1970s by groups of librarians (read more...)

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Platypod, Episode Five: CASPR – CASTAC in the Spring 2022

Angela VandenBroek, Dawn Nafus, Melissa Cefkin November 3, 2022
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This episode presents a recording of CASPR 2022, or the CASTAC in the Spring 2022 event, which took place on May 10, 2022. CASPR 2022 was organized to encourage dialogue on breaking down binaries that have separated academe and industry. Angela VandenBroek (TXST), Melissa Cefkin (Waymo), and Dawn Nafus (Intel) discuss their work in leading socially-informed research in industry contexts. (read more...)

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Disability Dongle

Liz Jackson, Alex Haagaard, Rua Williams April 19, 2022
이 컨텐츠는 한국어로도 읽어볼수 있습니다.
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I created the term “Disability Dongle” in 2019 to draw attention to the phenomenon of design and engineering students and practitioners who prototype “innovative” disability solutions. The definition satirizes an outcome in which designs or technologies “for” disabled people garner mainstream attention and accolades despite valid concerns disabled people have about them.  (read more...)

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