John Lennon
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226815664
- eISBN:
- 9780226815671
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226815671.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Visual Culture
Graffiti are part of the architecture of a conflict itself—ephemeral artifacts allowing insight into how protest movements react to their built environments. As a conflict rages, graffiti appear in ...
More
Graffiti are part of the architecture of a conflict itself—ephemeral artifacts allowing insight into how protest movements react to their built environments. As a conflict rages, graffiti appear in numerous forms, counteracting the violence being born on the bodies of protestors. As the conflict subsides, a new graffiti and street art scene emerges, one embraced by State and business communities. Like waves hitting the shore, each wave mixes with the previous and the following one, with no clear demarcations between them. In short, graffiti are messy politics. Conflict Graffiti comparatively examines these graffiti waves in Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, and Yemen and, in the US, in New Orleans and Detroit, to contextualize this amorphous but powerful tool of resistance. Examining graffiti before, during, and after these spasms of violence place a renewed emphasis on the racialized economic and social politics at the heart of the conflict. By studying the paint covered walls, new insights on conflict emerge.Less
Graffiti are part of the architecture of a conflict itself—ephemeral artifacts allowing insight into how protest movements react to their built environments. As a conflict rages, graffiti appear in numerous forms, counteracting the violence being born on the bodies of protestors. As the conflict subsides, a new graffiti and street art scene emerges, one embraced by State and business communities. Like waves hitting the shore, each wave mixes with the previous and the following one, with no clear demarcations between them. In short, graffiti are messy politics. Conflict Graffiti comparatively examines these graffiti waves in Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, and Yemen and, in the US, in New Orleans and Detroit, to contextualize this amorphous but powerful tool of resistance. Examining graffiti before, during, and after these spasms of violence place a renewed emphasis on the racialized economic and social politics at the heart of the conflict. By studying the paint covered walls, new insights on conflict emerge.
Henry M. Sayre
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226809823
- eISBN:
- 9780226809960
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226809960.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This book argues that when the novelist Émile Zola defended his friend Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia in 1867, saying that it complied to what he called “la loi des valeurs,” “the law of values,” ...
More
This book argues that when the novelist Émile Zola defended his friend Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia in 1867, saying that it complied to what he called “la loi des valeurs,” “the law of values,” he employed a double coding. Until this moment, light and dark in painting were generally described in terms of musical metaphor—higher and lower tones, notes, and scales. But the word “valeurs” had quite another meaning—referring to stocks and securities exchanged on the Bourse. Zola’s “valeurs” does refer to light and dark, but it is also a trope for the political economy of slavery—Olympia and her maid are objects of exchange, commodities. They represent the Second Empire’s complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the American South, where Civil War raged, allowing the French to invade Mexico, even as the Union blockade of Confederate ports had decimated the French cotton industry, forcing many of its female workforce into prostitution. The book outlines attitudes toward slavery that Manet shared with his friend the poet Charles Baudelaire (and through him, Poe), suggests the possible influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Manet’s painting, and focuses on the trope of woman as enslaved in the writings of both Zola and George Sand, culminating in Manet’s painting the U.S.S. Kearsarge sinking the Confederate sloop Alabama off Cherbourg harbor in June 1864 and the painter’s three-year dedication to portraying the execution of the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. These are the politics—and the values—that define Manet’s art.Less
This book argues that when the novelist Émile Zola defended his friend Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia in 1867, saying that it complied to what he called “la loi des valeurs,” “the law of values,” he employed a double coding. Until this moment, light and dark in painting were generally described in terms of musical metaphor—higher and lower tones, notes, and scales. But the word “valeurs” had quite another meaning—referring to stocks and securities exchanged on the Bourse. Zola’s “valeurs” does refer to light and dark, but it is also a trope for the political economy of slavery—Olympia and her maid are objects of exchange, commodities. They represent the Second Empire’s complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the American South, where Civil War raged, allowing the French to invade Mexico, even as the Union blockade of Confederate ports had decimated the French cotton industry, forcing many of its female workforce into prostitution. The book outlines attitudes toward slavery that Manet shared with his friend the poet Charles Baudelaire (and through him, Poe), suggests the possible influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Manet’s painting, and focuses on the trope of woman as enslaved in the writings of both Zola and George Sand, culminating in Manet’s painting the U.S.S. Kearsarge sinking the Confederate sloop Alabama off Cherbourg harbor in June 1864 and the painter’s three-year dedication to portraying the execution of the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. These are the politics—and the values—that define Manet’s art.
David Fisher, Dmitry Kleinbock, and Gregory Soifer (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226804026
- eISBN:
- 9780226804163
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226804163.001.0001
- Subject:
- Mathematics, Geometry / Topology
The impact of the work and ideas of Gregory Margulis on modern mathematics is broad, deep and profound. Margulis' work developed and explored key connections between ergodic theory, Lie theory, ...
More
The impact of the work and ideas of Gregory Margulis on modern mathematics is broad, deep and profound. Margulis' work developed and explored key connections between ergodic theory, Lie theory, geometry and number theory that have had a tremendous impact on mathematics. The goal of this volume is to provide the reader with an overview of many of the areas in which Margulis made contributions. His contributions range from deep insights into the structure of discrete subgroups of Lie groups that play a key role in many geometric topics to compelling contributions to homogeneous dynamics that played a key role in making it an essential tool for number theory.Less
The impact of the work and ideas of Gregory Margulis on modern mathematics is broad, deep and profound. Margulis' work developed and explored key connections between ergodic theory, Lie theory, geometry and number theory that have had a tremendous impact on mathematics. The goal of this volume is to provide the reader with an overview of many of the areas in which Margulis made contributions. His contributions range from deep insights into the structure of discrete subgroups of Lie groups that play a key role in many geometric topics to compelling contributions to homogeneous dynamics that played a key role in making it an essential tool for number theory.
Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226799001
- eISBN:
- 9780226799148
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226799148.001.0001
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, Economic History
Economists have long lamented that the inefficient Indian legal system undermines economic activity. How has this come to be? The prevailing common sense is that it is understaffed and ...
More
Economists have long lamented that the inefficient Indian legal system undermines economic activity. How has this come to be? The prevailing common sense is that it is understaffed and under-resourced, given the size of India’s population. This makes adjudication slow and costly. Taking this as given, Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy focuses on the content of the law and its relationship with economic development. It argues that legal evolution in independent India has primarily been shaped by three factors: the desire to reduce inequality and poverty; the suspicion that market activity, both domestic and international, can be detrimental to these goals; and the strengthening of Indian democracy over time, giving voice to a growing fraction of society, including the poor. For the first four decades after independence, the equity-oriented and market-skeptical development strategy adopted by independent India informed a range of interventions by the State. It tried to transfer land as well as to prevent its transfer. A range of private credit transactions were declared illegal. Employer-worker relationships in the manufacturing sector were highly regulated. Environmental law did not incentivize; it prohibited. As policy has become more market-friendly in the recent decades, India has been trying to align itself with global law. More legal and regulatory changes are needed but are opposed by potential losers who, often with good reason, are skeptical of the government’s promises of compensation. Their concerns cannot be ignored by governments that seek reelection. The State’s lack of credibility has slowed legal reform.Less
Economists have long lamented that the inefficient Indian legal system undermines economic activity. How has this come to be? The prevailing common sense is that it is understaffed and under-resourced, given the size of India’s population. This makes adjudication slow and costly. Taking this as given, Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy focuses on the content of the law and its relationship with economic development. It argues that legal evolution in independent India has primarily been shaped by three factors: the desire to reduce inequality and poverty; the suspicion that market activity, both domestic and international, can be detrimental to these goals; and the strengthening of Indian democracy over time, giving voice to a growing fraction of society, including the poor. For the first four decades after independence, the equity-oriented and market-skeptical development strategy adopted by independent India informed a range of interventions by the State. It tried to transfer land as well as to prevent its transfer. A range of private credit transactions were declared illegal. Employer-worker relationships in the manufacturing sector were highly regulated. Environmental law did not incentivize; it prohibited. As policy has become more market-friendly in the recent decades, India has been trying to align itself with global law. More legal and regulatory changes are needed but are opposed by potential losers who, often with good reason, are skeptical of the government’s promises of compensation. Their concerns cannot be ignored by governments that seek reelection. The State’s lack of credibility has slowed legal reform.
Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226816357
- eISBN:
- 9780226816364
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226816364.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This book examines the new female antihero in prestige dramas and comedies created between 2011 and 2020. It argues that this figure represents a fundamental shift away from the pro-social role ...
More
This book examines the new female antihero in prestige dramas and comedies created between 2011 and 2020. It argues that this figure represents a fundamental shift away from the pro-social role usually prescribed for women on television. In the dramas of the new millennium, the female antihero is murderous, ambitious, and conniving; in comedies she’s selfish, self-sabotaging, and anti-aspirational. Her signature move, in both genres, is a wholesale rejection of virtue and social responsibility—those burdens of a “civilized” society that fall disproportionately on women. Her willingness to flout these norms—to refuse the part of role model and transmitter of values—makes her deeply threatening. Indeed, given the central role of women in social reproduction—homemaking, the nuclear family, middle-class respectability—the female version of the antihero represents a far more profound threat to the status quo than does her male counterpart. Her smallest infractions are parsed for their challenge to feminine social norms, a phenomenon that’s amplified for women of color. And yet to her fans, the female antihero promises a shift away from discipline, achievement, and decorum at a time when society demands increasingly more from women. The female antiheroes of television thus constitute a revolt against expectations for financial solvency and familial success placed on women in the post-recessionary twenty-first century. They disrupt familiar narratives of progress and resiliency and push back against the myth of the modern-day super-woman—she who “has it all.” In so doing, they expand the possibilities for being female in contemporary America.Less
This book examines the new female antihero in prestige dramas and comedies created between 2011 and 2020. It argues that this figure represents a fundamental shift away from the pro-social role usually prescribed for women on television. In the dramas of the new millennium, the female antihero is murderous, ambitious, and conniving; in comedies she’s selfish, self-sabotaging, and anti-aspirational. Her signature move, in both genres, is a wholesale rejection of virtue and social responsibility—those burdens of a “civilized” society that fall disproportionately on women. Her willingness to flout these norms—to refuse the part of role model and transmitter of values—makes her deeply threatening. Indeed, given the central role of women in social reproduction—homemaking, the nuclear family, middle-class respectability—the female version of the antihero represents a far more profound threat to the status quo than does her male counterpart. Her smallest infractions are parsed for their challenge to feminine social norms, a phenomenon that’s amplified for women of color. And yet to her fans, the female antihero promises a shift away from discipline, achievement, and decorum at a time when society demands increasingly more from women. The female antiheroes of television thus constitute a revolt against expectations for financial solvency and familial success placed on women in the post-recessionary twenty-first century. They disrupt familiar narratives of progress and resiliency and push back against the myth of the modern-day super-woman—she who “has it all.” In so doing, they expand the possibilities for being female in contemporary America.
S. Pearl Brilmyer
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226815770
- eISBN:
- 9780226815794
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226815794.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the establishment of a new science, “the science of the formation of character.” Although Mill’s proposal failed as scientific practice, ...
More
In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the establishment of a new science, “the science of the formation of character.” Although Mill’s proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer maintains that it found its true home in realist fiction of the period, which employed the literary figure of character to investigate the nature of embodied experience. Bringing to life Mill’s unrealized dream of a science of character, novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner turned to narrative to explore how traits and behaviors in organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features—shapes, colors, and gestures—come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. Engaged with materialist science and philosophy, these authors transformed character from the liberal notion of the inner truth of an individual into a materially determined figuration produced through shifts in the boundaries between the body’s inside and outside. In their hands, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the laws governing physical and affective life. The Science of Character redraws late Victorian literary history to show how women and feminist novelists pushed realism to its aesthetic and philosophical limits in the crucial span between 1870 and 1920.Less
In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the establishment of a new science, “the science of the formation of character.” Although Mill’s proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer maintains that it found its true home in realist fiction of the period, which employed the literary figure of character to investigate the nature of embodied experience. Bringing to life Mill’s unrealized dream of a science of character, novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner turned to narrative to explore how traits and behaviors in organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features—shapes, colors, and gestures—come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. Engaged with materialist science and philosophy, these authors transformed character from the liberal notion of the inner truth of an individual into a materially determined figuration produced through shifts in the boundaries between the body’s inside and outside. In their hands, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the laws governing physical and affective life. The Science of Character redraws late Victorian literary history to show how women and feminist novelists pushed realism to its aesthetic and philosophical limits in the crucial span between 1870 and 1920.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226810164
- eISBN:
- 9780226810331
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226810331.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
This book chronicles the lives of musicians from Ethiopia and adjacent regions of the Horn of Africa beginning in the years preceding the 1974 Ethiopian revolution and extending through the first two ...
More
This book chronicles the lives of musicians from Ethiopia and adjacent regions of the Horn of Africa beginning in the years preceding the 1974 Ethiopian revolution and extending through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It traces musicians’ experiences before and during the revolution, records their memories of forced migration abroad, and details their roles founding new communities in the Ethiopian American diaspora. Based on decades of ethnographic observation and interviews in Ethiopia and in cities across North America as well as evidence from numerous songs, poetry, and proverbs, the book highlights the many artistic and social initiatives of these creative and mobile musicians and the ways in which they have offered inspiration and leadership within the rapidly growing Ethiopian American diaspora. The musicians’ backgrounds span different ethnic communities and generations, while their musical styles stretch across sacred, traditional, and popular repertories. The book also explores factors encouraging musicians to return to their homeland and the dilemmas that return presents. While suggesting that these individuals can be regarded as sentinel musicians in part because of heightened senses that enable them to both guard and guide their communities as well as to spark resistance through processes of cultural creativity, the book proposes that sentinel musicians have existed in other times and places, and that through their creativity, agency, and musical repertories, continue to transform many communities across the globe.Less
This book chronicles the lives of musicians from Ethiopia and adjacent regions of the Horn of Africa beginning in the years preceding the 1974 Ethiopian revolution and extending through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It traces musicians’ experiences before and during the revolution, records their memories of forced migration abroad, and details their roles founding new communities in the Ethiopian American diaspora. Based on decades of ethnographic observation and interviews in Ethiopia and in cities across North America as well as evidence from numerous songs, poetry, and proverbs, the book highlights the many artistic and social initiatives of these creative and mobile musicians and the ways in which they have offered inspiration and leadership within the rapidly growing Ethiopian American diaspora. The musicians’ backgrounds span different ethnic communities and generations, while their musical styles stretch across sacred, traditional, and popular repertories. The book also explores factors encouraging musicians to return to their homeland and the dilemmas that return presents. While suggesting that these individuals can be regarded as sentinel musicians in part because of heightened senses that enable them to both guard and guide their communities as well as to spark resistance through processes of cultural creativity, the book proposes that sentinel musicians have existed in other times and places, and that through their creativity, agency, and musical repertories, continue to transform many communities across the globe.
Steven Ruszczycky
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226788616
- eISBN:
- 9780226788890
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226788890.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book tracks the conjoined emergence of gay pornographic writing and gay literary fiction in the US during the contemporary period. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book responds to ...
More
This book tracks the conjoined emergence of gay pornographic writing and gay literary fiction in the US during the contemporary period. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book responds to scholarship on contemporary pornography, with its near-exclusive focus on photographic representations, by reformulating the question of porn in terms of writing and print culture; in doing so, it demonstrates how pornographic writing provided the material basis for counterpublics: forms of print-mediated stranger sociability that played a central role in the self-understanding and practices of a wide range of readers. This book builds its argument through close readings of texts by a number of writers, including William Carney, Dennis Cooper, Samuel Delany, John Rechy, and Samuel Steward, who recognized that gay pornographic writing was hardly a private pleasure, but instead mediated modes of queer counterpublic life. As this book demonstrates, those writers intuited how the cultural and political significance of pornographic writing derived from its subordinated status: its vulgarity, commercialism, pragmatic associations, and indifference to politics as traditionally understood nonetheless enabled readers to imagine forms of subjectivity and sociability that were often unrecognizable elsewhere.Less
This book tracks the conjoined emergence of gay pornographic writing and gay literary fiction in the US during the contemporary period. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book responds to scholarship on contemporary pornography, with its near-exclusive focus on photographic representations, by reformulating the question of porn in terms of writing and print culture; in doing so, it demonstrates how pornographic writing provided the material basis for counterpublics: forms of print-mediated stranger sociability that played a central role in the self-understanding and practices of a wide range of readers. This book builds its argument through close readings of texts by a number of writers, including William Carney, Dennis Cooper, Samuel Delany, John Rechy, and Samuel Steward, who recognized that gay pornographic writing was hardly a private pleasure, but instead mediated modes of queer counterpublic life. As this book demonstrates, those writers intuited how the cultural and political significance of pornographic writing derived from its subordinated status: its vulgarity, commercialism, pragmatic associations, and indifference to politics as traditionally understood nonetheless enabled readers to imagine forms of subjectivity and sociability that were often unrecognizable elsewhere.
Gino C. Segré and John D. Stack
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226805146
- eISBN:
- 9780226805283
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226805283.001.0001
- Subject:
- Mathematics, Mathematical Physics
As well as being a famously lucid lecturer, the great physicist Enrico Fermi was reported to be omniscient in almost every area of his chosen discipline so it is tantalizing to imagine how he might ...
More
As well as being a famously lucid lecturer, the great physicist Enrico Fermi was reported to be omniscient in almost every area of his chosen discipline so it is tantalizing to imagine how he might have taught the one-semester advanced undergraduate course on geophysics that he offered at Columbia University in the springs of 1939, 1940 and 1941. The brief set of notes that he left behind about the course he taught contain a list of the topics he discussed and some indication of how the material was presented. The two authors of this book have tried to fill in the gaps and create the book that two diligent students who attended Fermi’s lectures might have written, hopefully doing so without errors that Fermi would have noted. The range of topics he covered in the course is extraordinarily broad, touching in one way or another almost every branch of classical physics and going beyond that in a few cases: the techniques of classical mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, fluid mechanics, elasticity, electricity and magnetism are all present, all directed to solving questions of geophysical interest. The topics discussed include planetary motion, phase transitions, heat transfer, ocean tides, surface waves in fluids, seismic waves, radioactivity, magnetic storms, upper atmosphere phenomena ranging from the escape of light molecules to the reflection of radio waves by the ionosphere’s plasma and this is only a partial list.Less
As well as being a famously lucid lecturer, the great physicist Enrico Fermi was reported to be omniscient in almost every area of his chosen discipline so it is tantalizing to imagine how he might have taught the one-semester advanced undergraduate course on geophysics that he offered at Columbia University in the springs of 1939, 1940 and 1941. The brief set of notes that he left behind about the course he taught contain a list of the topics he discussed and some indication of how the material was presented. The two authors of this book have tried to fill in the gaps and create the book that two diligent students who attended Fermi’s lectures might have written, hopefully doing so without errors that Fermi would have noted. The range of topics he covered in the course is extraordinarily broad, touching in one way or another almost every branch of classical physics and going beyond that in a few cases: the techniques of classical mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, fluid mechanics, elasticity, electricity and magnetism are all present, all directed to solving questions of geophysical interest. The topics discussed include planetary motion, phase transitions, heat transfer, ocean tides, surface waves in fluids, seismic waves, radioactivity, magnetic storms, upper atmosphere phenomena ranging from the escape of light molecules to the reflection of radio waves by the ionosphere’s plasma and this is only a partial list.
Moritz Altenried
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226815497
- eISBN:
- 9780226815503
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226815503.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Science, Technology and Environment
The digital factory takes very different forms – it might be a platform, a video game, or a distribution center – but digital technology produces labor regimes that often show surprising continuities ...
More
The digital factory takes very different forms – it might be a platform, a video game, or a distribution center – but digital technology produces labor regimes that often show surprising continuities with classical factories just as well as novel configurations. The guiding thread of the book is to think about these continuities, reconfigurations, and new forms of the factory. From this angle, the book investigates the transformation of labor in digital capitalism. Combining a number of empirical studies into a narrative and conceptual framework, the book offers a fresh theoretical perspective on labor in the algorithmic world of digital capitalism. These areas of work are often hidden behind the supposed magic of algorithms, thought to be automated but in fact still highly dependent on human labor. Workers in German Amazon warehouses in tandem with workers on global digital labor platforms training artificial intelligence, delivery drivers in the gig economy, Chinese gaming workers, Filipino content moderators for platforms like Facebook, Google’s book scanning workers in California: these are the workers of today’s digital factory. Rooted in sociology, labor geography, anthropology, and media and cultural studies, The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation is based on more than seven years of research in different sites. Using a range of qualitative methods including ethnographic approaches and interviews as well as software and infrastructure studies, the book offers profound insights into different workplaces, infrastructures, platforms, labor regimes, and struggles playing out across the digital factory.Less
The digital factory takes very different forms – it might be a platform, a video game, or a distribution center – but digital technology produces labor regimes that often show surprising continuities with classical factories just as well as novel configurations. The guiding thread of the book is to think about these continuities, reconfigurations, and new forms of the factory. From this angle, the book investigates the transformation of labor in digital capitalism. Combining a number of empirical studies into a narrative and conceptual framework, the book offers a fresh theoretical perspective on labor in the algorithmic world of digital capitalism. These areas of work are often hidden behind the supposed magic of algorithms, thought to be automated but in fact still highly dependent on human labor. Workers in German Amazon warehouses in tandem with workers on global digital labor platforms training artificial intelligence, delivery drivers in the gig economy, Chinese gaming workers, Filipino content moderators for platforms like Facebook, Google’s book scanning workers in California: these are the workers of today’s digital factory. Rooted in sociology, labor geography, anthropology, and media and cultural studies, The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation is based on more than seven years of research in different sites. Using a range of qualitative methods including ethnographic approaches and interviews as well as software and infrastructure studies, the book offers profound insights into different workplaces, infrastructures, platforms, labor regimes, and struggles playing out across the digital factory.
Daemons Are Forever
The Hinge
Living on the Edge
The Pensive Image
After Redlining
Beethoven
The Calamity Form
Catastrophic Thinking
Congress Overwhelmed
