This Thursday DCMI presents: “Automating Servitude: How Platforms Exploit Women’s Work,” with Julia Ticona (@jticona.bsky.social). Professor Ticona is the author the brilliant book Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age (Oxford 2022) and much more. Grucci Room 3:30pm.

This April, we warmly welcome you to two lectures on computation and women's work: 💻 April 2, 3:30: Julia Ticona, “Automating Servitude: How Platforms Exploit Women’s Work” ⚙ April 9, 3:30: Patrick Chung, “Militarized Circuits: Expat Engineers, Rural Women Factory Workers, and Global High Tech”

A warmer and more earnest colleague could not have been wished for than Eduardo Mendieta. Our final exchange was in appreciation of this article that I enjoyed so much I sent it to my mom. Rest well.

Classroom report: "To be a barnacle on the floating corpse of capital. Was that the most I could hope for from a professional life?" Ending the Work + Literature course on @lclaberge.bsky.social's gorgeous, funny FAKE WORK: moving and meta, a workplace satire and memoir of political consciousness.

Fake Work

haymarketbooks.org

This Wednesday, Melissa Charenko tells us all about "Proxy Data: A History of the Scientific Stand-in." In person only, Wednesday at 3pm, locals come one come all!

Digital Culture + Media Initiative@dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Our first in-person lecture of the year is Melissa Charenko, “Proxy Data: A History of the Scientific Stand-in.” @melissacharenko.bsky.social is an Assistant Professor at U Penn, and will speak to us at 3pm on 11/19 in the Grucci Room. Come one, come all. We couldn't be more excited!

Classroom report: This week in a gen ed course about work, we're finishing this very good book by Erik Baker (@erikmbaker.bsky.social). It's good in the classroom, great on the history, and right on the politics. Read it, share it, teach it.

Make Your Own Job — Harvard University Press

A sweeping new history of the changing meaning of work in the United States, from Horatio Alger to Instagram influencers.How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twenti...

hup.harvard.edu

Really great work by a friend of friends of the initiative.

Justin Raden@jraden.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Wrote a thing on the hot summer of uni AI adoption for @defector.com A huge thanks to @nathankhensley.bsky.social and @anniemcc.bsky.social. @brandyjensen.bsky.social is a legend. And anything smart in hear is thanks to hours of discussion, texting, and draft reading by @smosment.bsky.social

Our first in-person lecture of the year is Melissa Charenko, “Proxy Data: A History of the Scientific Stand-in.” @melissacharenko.bsky.social is an Assistant Professor at U Penn, and will speak to us at 3pm on 11/19 in the Grucci Room. Come one, come all. We couldn't be more excited!

"That's unexpected." "It's completely unexpected." ... is an objectively funny way to begin a conversation about one of the most widely reported (if collectively disavowed) ongoing stories in the higher ed and tech industrieds.

Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn’t Follow.

nytimes.com

Ground beef entrepreneur predicts all-hamburger future.

OpenAI CEO tells Federal Reserve confab that entire job categories will disappear due to AI

Sam Altman also said AI could already diagnose better than doctors, as his company expands into Washington

theguardian.com

Featuring excellent methodological foreword by DCMI fave Marc Steinberg.

Marc Steinberg@msteinbrg.bsky.social · last yr.

Platforms and the Moving Image book now out! Edited by Philipp Keidl and Jana Zündel, featuring the work of many amazing scholars, and mostly junior scholars, including work on Netflix, IMDb, KaraGarga, smart homes, Disney+, ALTBalaji, and much more - meson.press/books/platfo...

If you're in Durham for @sns2025.bsky.social at the end of the month, come by, say hi, bright and early. Friday @ 8:30am, with Ben Mangrum and Justin Mitchell:

𝗧𝗢𝗗𝗔𝗬

Digital Culture + Media Initiative@dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · last yr.

"Data Work as Care Work" — we couldn't be more excited for our upcoming visit from Kalindi Vora of Yale. On April 10 at 3:30 in the Grucci Room, @kalindivora.bsky.social urges us to "challenge ongoing coloniality in tech design in the face of growing datafication."

Our third and final talk of this year's series is next week! In “Finance by Other Means? The Ambiguous Moral Economies of the Subscription Business Model," Aaron Shapiro (@bricolageyumyum.bsky.social) asks how we might "reclaim subscriptionization for post-capitalist transformation." Join us!

"Data Work as Care Work" — we couldn't be more excited for our upcoming visit from Kalindi Vora of Yale. On April 10 at 3:30 in the Grucci Room, @kalindivora.bsky.social urges us to "challenge ongoing coloniality in tech design in the face of growing datafication."

TODAY!

Digital Culture + Media Initiative@dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · last yr.

Cannot wait: on 4.3, the year's first DCMI talk is Omedi Ochieng, brilliant author of INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION and GROUNDWORK FOR THE PRACTICE OF THE GOOD LIFE! (Up next: Kalindi Vora on 4.10 + Aaron Shapiro on 4.17!) @omediochieng.bsky.social @kalindivora.bsky.social @bricolageyumyum.bsky.social

Classroom report: This article by @ursulahuws.bsky.social can still strike the hearts of students learning to be creative workers (and of at least some of the teachers who teach them). It's also a crystal-hard model of dialectical thinking.

Cannot wait: on 4.3, the year's first DCMI talk is Omedi Ochieng, brilliant author of INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION and GROUNDWORK FOR THE PRACTICE OF THE GOOD LIFE! (Up next: Kalindi Vora on 4.10 + Aaron Shapiro on 4.17!) @omediochieng.bsky.social @kalindivora.bsky.social @bricolageyumyum.bsky.social

Special session of #MLA25 #MLA2025, next Friday at 3:30: "Sentimental Politics after Doomerism," with Zachary Loeb, Matt Tierney, Melanie Abeygunawardana, and Sheila Liming (@seeshespeak.bsky.social). Come say hi.

An outlier in our program of in-person talks, our series of spring 2022 was held remotely in a series of webinars. Videos still linked from our site, under "recent posts," include such friends and luminaries as Yuri Furuhata, Armond Towns, Marc Steinberg, Jim Hodge, Alenda Chang, and Michael Sawyer.

So excited to announce our spring speakers! April 3: Omedi Ochieng, Colorado (@omediochieng.bsky.social) April 10: Kalindi Vora, Yale (@kalindivora.bsky.social) April 17: Aaron Shapiro, UNC (@bricolageyumyum.bsky.social) Talks are in-person in the Grucci Room, Burrowes 102, at 3:30pm. Join us!

What we are (speaker series, course incubator) and do: