Extracting concepts

For over ten years, we have run research projects that grapple with questions of labour and its transformations across sites in China, India, Australia, Greece, Chile, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Germany. These investigations have taken us to locations such as recycling villages, semiconductor factories, e-waste dumps, container shipping ports, warehouses, copper mines and smelters, data centres, and railway terminals. Dubbed Organized Networks, Transit Labour, Logistical Worlds, and Data Farms, these projects have involved collaborative team research orchestrated in cooperation with local participants, many of whom are activist researchers. Labour precarity has been a consistent preoccupation of our investigations, which have engaged with questions of logistics, software, infrastructure, and data politics. We have sought to understand how digital technologies and logistical media have not only enabled the proliferation of precarious labour regimes across different worksites and economic sectors but also generated fantasies of openness, participation, and seamlessness that have papered over these same conditions of precarity. Organizing this research has involved engaging researchers across sites who have different interests, employment statuses, and levels of attachment to and investment in these projects. Consequently, labour precarity is not only an object of our inquiries but also a condition of their possibility. The following paragraphs reflect on this predicament and our negotiation of it.