I am a broadly trained human geographer and PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I study the impact of algorithmic technologies on work processes and the social lives of workers. Specifically, my research explores how workers make sense of algorithmic technologies, and how these technologies layer onto other social inequities to drive racial regimes of precarity and premature death. I came to this topic while doing community engaged research with delivery workers in New York City, where I witnessed how algorithmic work intensification forced workers to risk their lives while on the job. Rather than ceding to the “black-box” of the artificial intelligence (AI) technologies undergirding their jobs, these workers documented and negotiated the proliferating impacts of AI in their everyday lives.
Drawing from the history of technology, labor sociology, feminist political economy, and over four years of participatory ethnography, my research historicizes AI technologies in the long durée of struggles between workers and capital, articulating how technological progress is a fraught and contested process. Importantly, it identifies the spatial contours of this struggle, highlighting how processes of uneven development and social reproduction in the city are shaped by sociotechnical systems of algorithms, apps, urban regulation, and workers’ social movements. To this end, my dissertation in progress, tentatively titled “Working Class Life and the After-Effects of Algorithmic Management: Immigrants, Wages, and Urban Space,” uses collaboratively designed mixed methods research (surveys, interviews, and participant observation) to outline how algorithms and app companies dispossess workers of their labor and time, and how workers organize in response to make their lives better amidst these conditions.
My writing has appeared in cultural geographies, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, and Frontiers: A Journal of Womens’ Studies. My work is supported by numerous awards and grants, including the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, UW-Madison University Fellowship, Morgridge Center Community Engaged Research Grant, and the Public Humanities Exchange Scholarship.