Global ETD Search

1	Laboring to create magic : the new worker in the emerging retail industries of Kolkata Maitra, Saikat 10 September 2015 (has links) My dissertation focuses on the means through which a new worker-identity is getting crafted in the city of Kolkata in India under the impact of neoliberal economic policies of the state on one hand and the changing modes of capital formation on the other. Kolkata’s position as the pre-eminent city of British India in the nineteenth century had led to a huge influx of industrial capital. However, the post-independence era saw a gradual flight of capital due to a long history of political and social turbulence. With the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, both national and trans-national capital have started flowing back into Kolkata, especially in sectors such as real-estate, retail and service industries. This has led to a huge proliferation of expensive shopping malls and cafes in the city employing a large urban youth population, usually from under-privileged backgrounds. With the state giving up its former faith in socialist principles and instead strongly committing itself to neoliberal economic reforms, the future of development for Kolkata is getting tied to its capacity to attract corporate capital, particularly in organized retail and service sectors. As such, urban labor is coming under a tremendous scrutiny to delineate an identity according to principles of flexibility, self-discipline and responsiveness to the needs of contemporary private capitalist interests. In spaces like shopping malls and exclusive cafes, workers are repeatedly trained and indoctrinated to show an affective capacity to serve, be cheerful in their work and to display through bodily comportments the signs of a global cosmopolitanism that can sustain consumption. However, with most of the workers themselves coming from low-income backgrounds with little or no knowledge of the roles they are asked to play as part of their work, uncertainties and anxieties exacerbate the already precarious position of these young workers. This study therefore looks at how workers negotiate everyday work environments and how such work environments in turn alter and condition their identity through multiple strategies of discipline and control emanating from both the neoliberal state as well as corporate institutions. / text Affective labor Urban
2	'If I Don't Have That, No Learning": Significance of Student-Centered Affective Labor Among Public High School Teachers in Tacoma, WA Dawson, Delaney 01 January 2019 (has links) This thesis explores how public high school teachers in Tacoma, WA, USA conceptualize the values and rewards of their career through their professional interactions at various levels of the educational institution. By analyzing teachers’ career motivations, goals, and definitions of success, it becomes clear that these teachers most highly prioritize their affective labor and the relationships they build with their students. Teachers consistently emphasize the non-financial, student-centered elements of the compensation they receive for their work, and their grievances about the structure of the school system primarily center around the constraints placed upon their performance of student-centered affective labor by the neoliberal foci of the institution of the public school. Ultimately, it is argued that teachers’ choice to emphasize this affective labor can be seen as a public reclamation of a historically feminized form of labor in an effort to cultivate a vocational sense of meaning within their career. Teachers Affective Labor Career Education Social and Cultural Anthropology
3	In Cisio Scribere: Labor, Knowledge, and Politics of Cabdriving in Mexico City and San Francisco Anderson, Donald Nathan January 2015 (has links) This dissertation investigates cabdriving as a form of spatial work, involved in the production and reproduction of social space through three interrelated products: physical movement from place to place; the experience of movement, of connection made between places; and the articulation of these places, movements, and experiences with visions of society and the social. The particular forms of knowledge involved in this work, and the politics in which taxicabs are entangled, are explored through fieldwork conducted in two very different cities: Mexico City and San Francisco, California. The political context of cabdriving knowledge changes as new technologies are introduced into the cab to reframe the relationship between the interior of the cab (where passengers and drivers interact) and the exteriors (urban and informational spaces) through which it passes. In Mexico City, interviews with libre, base, and sitio cabdrivers about their knowledge and work strategies revealed three aspects of cabdriving as a rhythm analytical practice: 1) the points of confluence, i.e., the spatial pattern or method by which drivers link up with passengers; 2) the temporal and monetary patterns of constraint the occupation puts on drivers; and 3) the sense of the city which emerges, as this is described by drivers. Each form of taxicab has different patterns of movement, and different spatial and technological means of establishing contact with customers, which results in differing experiences and strategies elaborated by drivers. In San Francisco, interviews were conducted with taxi, limousine, and "ridesharing" drivers on the impact of smartphone-enabled "e-hailing" technology. The term allegorithm (the productive co-deployment of a socially relevant allegorical script and a software-mediated algorithm) is borrowed from gaming studies to describe how interfaces reframe the cab-riding experience. Of particular interest is the emergence of "ridesharing," or the overcab (a cab-riding experience which is superior to the experience of riding in a cab). The effectiveness of the overcab’s reframing project depends on the acceptance and performance by participants of the "overcab" narrative. There are indications that the transcendence of the overcab is fragile, and that cracks are developing in the experiences of both drivers and passengers, due to continuing tensions which the overcab has failed to resolve, or which have been introduced as part of its regulating mechanism. Mexico City ridesharing San Francisco splintering urbanism taxicabs Anthropology affective labor
4	The Caring Curator : Exploring Conditions for Care in Curatorial Practices Østergaard, Laus Katrine January 2023 (has links) The concept of care has recently gained significant attention in cultural institutions and among artists. This trend was particularly evident in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, which contributed to increased public programming focused on caring practices and the concept of care. One notable example is documenta fifteen, organized by ruangrupa, which used "lumbung" (a method of collectivity and sharing) as its core working method for both funding distribution and organization. Previous research has shown how the role of the curator has changed from one who takes care of artworks to one that is dependent on “social infrastructures and personal charm.” This study identifies problems and structures that hinder care practices among curators through interviews and an auto-ethnographic approach. Care curating cultural work contemporary art affective labor care ethics work conditions Other Humanities not elsewhere specified Övrig annan humaniora Cultural Studies Kulturstudier Visual Arts Bildkonst
5	Computation as Strange Material : Excursions into Critical Accidents Lagerkvist, Love January 2021 (has links) Waking up in a world where everyone carries a miniature supercomputer, interaction designers find themselves in their forerunners dreams. Faced with the reality of planetary-scale we have to confront the task of articulating approaches responsive this accidental ubiquity of computation. This thesis attempts such a formulation by defining computation as a strange material, a plasticity shaped equally by its technical properties and the mode of production by which is its continuously re-produced. The definition is applied through a methodology of excursions — participatory explorations into two seemingly disparate sites of computation, connected in they ways they manifest a labor of care. First, we visit the social infrastructures that constitute the Linux kernel, examining strangle entanglements of programming and care in the world's largest design process. This is followed by a tour into the thorny lands of artificial intelligence, situated in the smart replies of LinkedIn. Here, we investigate the fluctuating border between the artificial and the human with participants performing AI, formulating new Turing tests in the process. These excursions afford an understanding of computation as fundamentally re-produced through interaction, a strange kind of affective work the understanding of which is crucial if we ambition to disarm the critical accidents of our present future. machine learning artificial intelligence ml ai interaction design computation strange material LinkedIn smart reply artificial artificial intelligence neo-rationalism materialism marxism computers iot material method ubicomp labor labour affective labour affective labor post-operaism excursion critical accident strange loop strange attractors Linux Linux kernel mailing list Turing test imitation game Engineering and Technology Teknik och teknologier

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