Abstract: Work outside of formal organizations—often referred to as independent, gig, contract or freelance work—is on the rise globally, both out of worker choice and necessity. Scholars have shown that independent work conditions allow for new worker autonomies but also lead to concerning new vulnerabilies. Working from theory of infrastructure and articulation work, this talk sheds light on key debates about independent work from the vantage point of two cases – tuk tuk drivers in Cambodia and creative sector workers in the United States. Dr. Jack argues in the first case that tuk tuk workers manage increased financial precarity emerging from the integration of digital tools into Phnom Penh driving infrastructure by leaning on long-standing social and spatial relations: their neighborhood informal collectives. In the second case, Dr. Jack argues that creative workers engage in different types of structuring moves—work done to navigate and integrate their multiple responsibilities—to accomplish their independence. These moves are enabled by the application of resources that workers have at hand, the most common of which are space, money, social support, and time. These cases empirically draw on a suite of qualitative research methods including participant observation, interviews, and a diary study. The findings Dr. Jack shares contribute to debates on the future of work that the possibilities and limitations of new forms of independent work are necessarily bounded by the social/spatial/financial/temporal milieux of workers.

Bio: Margaret Jack is a postdoctoral scholar on the NSF-funded project “Creating Work/Life” with a team spanning Syracuse University (PI: Ingrid Erickson) and University of California, Irvine (PI: Melissa Mazmanian). Margareet is also an adjunct professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering where she teaches “Ethics and Technology” and “Transnational Technology.” Dr. Jack has a PhD in Information Science from Cornell University, an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in History and Science from Harvard College. In 2010-2013, she worked as a financial analyst in the technology-media-telecom sector in Silicon Valley. and has published in the Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI), The Information Society, Global Perspectives, ACM Interactions, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and in popular news outlets. Her forthcoming book Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology is being published in the Labor and Technology series in the spring 2023 MIT Press catalogue (Katie Helke, editor; Winifred Poster, series editor).