For the past years, we have faced a repeated experience when presenting our work on prisoners training AI. Scholars in the fields of critical data and algorithm studies start nodding, as if they already knew what we were going to say. What else is prison data labor than an effort to harness the prison-industrial complex in the service of the global data extraction machinery?

The final instalment in our Electronics Ecologies series, MANUFACTURING brings together scholars in geography, media and labour studies to discuss the growth in electronics and chip manufacturing in East and South East Asia.

The deepening integration of the technology sector with the FIRE sector—finance, insurance, real estate—is a profoundly consequential development in modern capitalism. Separately these sectors are among the most powerful forces in society, with access to untold wealth and the ability to act like private forms of governance. When working together, they boost each other to new levels of dominance. Going by terms like fintech, insurtech, and proptech, these interdisciplinary enterprises have acquired an inescapable influence over our lives, even if we only notice a fraction of the ways they interact with us. These terms are large umbrellas under which vast arrays of systems are clustered, each one aiming to deploy digital solutions that serve the needs of technological and financial capital.

Join us as we present and celebrate the launch of two significant project reports and Jeni Lee’s most recent documentary

The transformation of work lies at the centre of our social and political present and future.  This panel explores dimensions of this transformation through a relational approach to work and traverses the possibilities it offers to re-imagine work futures.