Digital Labour at Economic Margins: African Workers and the Global Information Economy. (Forthcoming Publication)

Posted on by Phil Howard

I have a new publication coming out soon in the Review of African Political Economy, with my colleague Mark Graham. The paper is based on the research we have been carrying out over a number of years in Africa. It deals with the role African digital labour is playing in the global information economy and helping create and develop some of the contemporary digital technologies that we use today. The link to download this paper is below.

 

Anwar, M. A. and Graham, M. (Forthcoming) Digital Labour at Economic Margins: African Workers and the Global Information Economy, Review of African Political Economy.

 

Summary

In discussions about the locations that make up the key productive nodes of the digital economy, African workers rarely gets a mention. The main aim of our paper is to make visible the invisible and bring light to the role African workers are playing in developing key emergent and everyday digital technologies such as autonomous vehicles, machine learning systems, next-generation search engines and recommendations systems. Once we acknowledge that many contemporary digital technologies rely on a lot of human labour to drive their interfaces, we can begin to piece together what the new global division of labour for digital work looks like and build greater socio-political responses (both at the global and local scale) to make some of these value chains more transparent, ethical and rewarding.

Some of our other new and forthcoming publications on digital labour in Africa from the Geonet Project are:

An article in Competition and Change which touches the theme of the gig economy in Africa and its implications on job quality.

Suggested citation:

  • Anwar, M. ​A. and Graham, M. (Forthcoming) Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Freedom, Flexibility, Precarity, and Vulnerability in the Gig Economy in Africa, Competition and Change.

Also, a recently published article in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space examines labour agency in the gig economy. Link to Free Access download is here.

Suggested citation:

 

Related Works

 

 

  • Graham, M. and Anwar, M.A. 2018. Digital LabourIn: Digital Geographies Ash, J., Kitchin, R. and Leszczynski, A. (eds.). Sage: London. 177-187.

 

Phil Howard

Philip N. Howard is a professor and writer. He has written numerous empirical research articles, and published in a number of disciplines, on the use of digital media for both civic engagement and social control in countries around the world. He is a statutory Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Professorial Fellow at Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He has courtesy appointments as a professor at the University of Washington’s Department of Communication and as a Fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. He has held senior academic appointments at Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia Universities, and from 2013-15 he helped design and launch a new School of Public Policy at Central European University in Budapest. Recently he received a Consolidator Award from the European Research Council for his study of algorithms and public life. His projects on digital activism, information access, and modern governance in both democracies and authoritarian regimes have been supported by the National Science Foundation, US Institutes of Peace, and Intel’s People and Practices Group. He has published eight books and over 120 academic articles, book chapters, conference papers, and commentary essays on information technology, international affairs and public life. His research spans several disciplines, and he is among a small number of scholars who have won awards from all three major academic associations for his work in political science, sociology, and communication. He is the author, most recently, of Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up. Howard’s research and commentary writing has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many international media outlets. His B.A. is in political science from Innis College at the University of Toronto, his M.Sc. is in economics from the London School of Economics, and his Ph.D. is in sociology from Northwestern University. His website is philhoward.org, and he tweets from @pnhoward. His PGP key can be found here.

More Posts