I'll be doing a zoom talk at Humboldt University (Berlin) next week, discussing my work on telepresent labor and giving some updates on recent developments. Looking forward to learning from the digital labor + migration research going on there. Reg details below --

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Migrants & Machines: Automation and the Future of Labour Migration

December 13, 12 - 2pm (Central European Time) via Zoom.

In our digital times, policymakers and economists alike have started to speculate about the end of traditional labour migration due to the prospects of remote work and robots replacing migrant workers. The rationality behind these fantasies: Labour, skills and data can move digitally, while migrant bodies are prevented from crossing borders.  While much of this scenario remains a phantasy to this day, scholars of digital labour have observed phenomenons of “virtual migration” since the global spread of information and communication technology infrastructures. From call center workers and IT specialists to content moderators and AI microtaskers: Digital platforms already enable capital access to distributed labour power across the globe to serve, extend and augment machines. Meanwhile, costs of social reproduction are further externalized to the worker’s home countries and private households. The event aims to look at the global movement of workers behind automation technologies and asks how digital technology transforms practices and forms of labour mobility.

Paul Roquet is an associate professor in media studies and Japan studies at the University of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In his talk, he will present parts of his latest book The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan (Columbia, 2022), where he analyses how Japanese telerobotics companies and researchers envision the use of telerobotics for lower-skilled service jobs. They promise Japanese employers to extract physical labour not only from the dwindling number of Japanese citizens but also remotely from foreign nationals otherwise excluded from the workforce by national borders and immigration law.

The event will be hosted and introduced by Mira Wallis and Moritz Altenried (Humboldt-Universität Berlin). Working at the intersection of labour, migration and digital technologies, they have addressed the question of migration and digital labour empirically and conceptually in different contexts, for example in the research project Digitalisation of Labour and Migration (together with Manuela Bojadžijev): https://www.platform-mobilities.net/en

The event is organised by the Laboratory Migration at the Institute for European Ethnology of the Humbolt-Universität Berlin, in cooperation with the Berlin Institute for Migration Research (BIM).

Please register with: moritz.altenried@hu-berlin.de to receive the link for the event.