Date & Time: April 10, Friday, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Location: LIB 1117

ZOOM ID: 992 1793 6695 | Passcode: 0410

Guest Speaker: Dr. Sophie Ping SUN, Associate Professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Abstract:

Food Delivery Workers are the human infrastructure of our society. This talk uses the “algorithms in everyday laboring” approach to explore the platform laboring conditions in main Chinese food delivery platform such as Taobao Flash Sale and Meituan. In particular, it examines how delivery workers make sense of algorithms through parameters like temporality, gamification, distinction and AI idiocy. It demonstrates that couriers in food delivery platform are not simply passive entities subjected to a digital “panopticon”, but rather, that they have created their own ‘organic algorithms’ in response in order to manage and in some cases, even subvert the system. It explains why digital labor has become both more accessible and more precarious in contemporary China, and it proposes the notion of “algorithmic making and remaking” as an object of study in future technology and digital labor studies.

Bio:

Sophie Ping SUN is an Associate Professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the platform economy, and digital labour, AI and social development. She brings interdisciplinary perspectives to understand the social and cultural textures of digital platforms through ethnographic fieldwork and first-hand data. She is the author of the bestselling book Transitonal Labour: Food-Delivery Workers in the Platform Economy of China (《过渡劳动》in Chinese).