The global digitalization process sweeping the world in the last few decades is often approached through the prism of some disruptive or innovative tech products, the big tech companies that “built” them or the relentless public efforts to regulate them. Still, the practical picture actually looks much more mundane: taking the form of products as seemingly as simple as an e-commerce banner, a check-in app or a simple sale receipt, developed in global teams bringing together developers, designers, researchers, quality analysts or products and projects managers often based in the Majority World – in major tech subcontracting or outsourcing hubs such as India or Brazil – and working directly for clients or subsidiaries based in Europe or the US.

But who are these workers? And how are the international division of labour, coloniality of power and overall political economy of the tech industry shaping their work experiences and the products they build?

Based on an ongoing global research and extensive ethnographic interviews with Brazilian and Indian tech workers regarding their trajectories, worldviews and experience in global teams, this paper aims at uncovering their perspectives on the inner workings of the companies they are working for, the challenges of consultancy work for clients based in the Minority World and the very social, cultural and political implications of this global organization of labour that then become visible.

With algorithms permeating into our everyday practices, people’s knowledge of algorithms has attracted growing attention from different fields. In this study, we bring algorithmic knowledge to the field of crowdsourcing work, where people intensively interact with algorithmic mechanisms embedded in crowdsourcing platforms to deal with precarious working conditions and make a living. The purpose of this work-in-progress study is to highlight two types of algorithmic knowledge: personal understanding of algorithmic operations (i.e., self-perceived algorithmic knowledge) and objectively verifiable knowledge of the technical facts about algorithms (i.e., technical algorithmic knowledge) in the context MTurk, a crowdsourcing platform. Starting from a quantitative online survey (N=168), this study aims to build up a complementary analytical framework by adopting a mixed method approach to further explicate how the two types of algorithmic knowledge intervene in people’s perception of precarity and unpack the process in which algorithmic knowledge is formed and developed, ultimately mending the ‘rupture’ in the existing literature on the study of algorithm and algorithmic knowledge.

AI has recently become a sticking point in labor negotiations for workers in media industries. This paper, drawn from a larger ongoing project, employs media discourse analysis and ethnographic observation to analyze how organized cultural workers constructed narratives about AI during and after the 2023 WGA and SAG strikes. Critical scholars of media labor lament the seeming intractability among cultural workers of ideological “enterprise values” that prioritize flexibility and individual creative autonomy over collective solidarity. Yet we find that enterprise values are falling into disfavor among prominent groups of media workers – and that unions’ strategic narratives about AI may be serving as a catalyst for their downfall. Striking media workers laid claim to AI-related protections not on the grounds that AI tools couldn’t do their jobs (due to the uniquely skilled and creative nature of their work), but rather on a normative principle: that ALL work is deserving of structural protection in the age of AI. While studios and AI companies sought to frame creative work as something that, due to its very nature, could not be automated (even as they tellingly resisted the unions’ demands to place formal limits on AI’s role in the labor process), the unions emphasized not the technological feasibility of AI-induced job displacement, but its normative stakes. We conclude by calling for future research that further explores the relationship between organized labor groups, emerging technologies, and class consciousness in media industries.

This flexibility, fuelled by technological advancements, has led to the blurring of work and life, becoming an inherent condition of journalists. While previous studies have framed this issue through the lens of work-life balance or work-life conflict, this research adopts a work-life blending perspective. Instead of viewing work and life as opposing forces, it explores how journalists perceive and navigate their integration when separation is no longer feasible.

This study focuses on Chinese female journalists in their early and mid-career stages, before becoming mothers— a group often overlooked in existing literature, which typically emphasizes married women with children.

Using precarity as a conceptual framework, this study draws on three focus group interviews, each with 5-6 journalists from local and regional print media. Thematic analysis is employed to examine how they perceive their work-life blending experiences.

The findings reveal three central tensions:

• While journalists accept work-life blending as a given, they simultaneously acknowledge that its negative consequences outweigh its benefits, especially in terms of their well-being and health.
• Despite believing that work-life blending is inevitable, they continue to seek temporary detachment from work, often using technology or relying on family members to help them disengage.
• The blending of work and life is emotionally charged but experienced differently across career stages.

This study contributes to the understanding of journalistic precarity by exploring its emotional dimensions, highlighting how work-life blending fosters feelings of entrapment, exhaustion, and instability.