[SDH/SEMI Members] FW: Conference Announcement - Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens

[Ray Siemens]

From: Mirela Nicoleta Parau <mparau at uwo.ca> 

'Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens'

A conference hosted by the Digital Labour Group, Faculty of Information and
Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, October 16-18, 2009, London,
Ontario, Canada. 

We are happy to announce that our conference website is now open. Please
visit us at http://conferences.fims.uwo.ca/digitallabour/ for information on
the conference, registration, travel and accommodation. 

Register by September 1st for a 20% early registration discount. Fees are
additionally discounted for graduate students.

'Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens' addresses the implications of
digital labour as they are emerging in practice, politics, policy, culture,
and theoretical enquiry. As workers, as authors, and as citizens, we are
increasingly summoned and disciplined by new digital technologies that
define the workplace and produce ever more complex regimes of surveillance
and control. At the same time, new possibilities for agency and new spaces
for collectivity are borne from these multiplying digital innovations. This
conference aims to explore this social dialectic, with a specific focus on
new forms of labour. 

The changing conditions of digital capitalism often blur distinctions
between workers, authors and citizens more than they clarify them. Digital
workers, for example, are often authors of content for the increasingly
convergent and synergistic end markets of entertainment capitalism - but
authors whose rights as such have been thoroughly alienated. Citizens are
often compelled to construct their identities in such a way as to produce
the flexible and entrepreneurial selves demanded by the heavily
consumer-oriented 'experience and attention economies' of digitalized
post-Fordism. 

How might we come to understand the breakdown of distinctions between labour
and creativity, work and authorship, value and productive excess in the new
digital economy? What is labour in an era where participation in the
cultural industries is the preferred conduit to autonomy and
self-valorization? What struggles do information and entertainment workers
and workers in an increasingly digitalized manufacturing sector share as
social understandings of labour, alienation and authorship continue to morph
according to the changing fashions of heavily fetishized technologies? What
might recent theorizing on the infinitely malleable 'post-Fordist image
worker' tell us about the nature of affective ties to states and other
political formations in the twenty-first century?

Union activists will assist academic specialists in assessing these and
other crucial questions. Two panels will include representatives from the
Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), the Writers
Guild of Canada (WGC), and the Canadian Media Guild (CMG). Other guild
confirmation is pending. Academic participants include:

Keynote - Ursula Huws (London Metropolitan University and Analytica Social
and Economic Research): "On the Cybertariat: Digital Labour, Social
Relations and the Workplace" 

Keynote - Vincent Mosco (Department of Sociology, Queens University,
Kingston, Ontario): "Knowledge Labour: Work in Progress"

Catherine McKercher (School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton
University, Ottawa) 

Catherine Fisk (School of Law, University of California at Irvine) 

David Hesmondhalgh (Institute of Communications Studies, University of
Leeds)

Brian Holmes (activist and cultural critic, Paris) 

Barry King (School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of
Technology) 

Andrea Fumagalli (Department of Political Economy and Quantitative Methods,
University of Pavia)

Dorothy Kidd (Department of Media Studies, University of San Francisco) 

Vicki Mayer (Communication Department, Tulane University, New Orleans)

Helen Kennedy (Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds). 

The Digital Labour Conference Organizing Committee: Jonathan Burston, Edward
Comor, James Compton, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Alison Hearn, Ajit Pyati, Sandra
Smeltzer, Matt Stahl, Sam Trosow.

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