<div dir="ltr">Hi everyone,<div><br></div><div>I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and my research:</div><div><br></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">My name is Niels van Doorn and I'm an Assistant Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam (Department of Media Studies). My PhD dissertation (completed in 2009 at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research- ASCoR) </font><span style="font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">focused on the digital mediation of gender, sexuality, and embodiment, as well as the unstable relationship between the intimate and public forms of sociality produced through these mediations. After obtaining my PhD I received a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), which enabled me to conduct a two-year postdoctoral research project at Johns Hopkins University, where I worked in the Department of Political Science. </font></span></div>
<div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:10pt"><br></span></font></div><div>
<span style="font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">This project (which ran from August 2010 until September 2012) followed up on some of the themes of my dissertation – such
as the articulation of nonheteronormative gender and sexuality, and the
affective networks that develop around these practices – while also expanding their scope beyond the realm of digital media and introducing a new
problematic: the complex relationship between intimacy and citizenship. </font></span><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:10pt">One of the goals was to
rethink citizenship <i>through intimacy</i>
as a ‘practice of composition’; a collective process of constructing a common
world through intimate relationships between people (queers, people of color, the poor) who have been largely abandoned by
conventional institutions of citizenship and public life. </span>
<span style="font-size:10pt">Through an ethnography of various collectives that make up Baltimore’s LGBT community, I attended to the
ways in which their intimate practices and performances create an
opening for reimagining a better, more joyful civic life based on alternative
conceptions of kinship, propriety, and solidarity. I am currently in the process of finishing a monograph based on this research project.</span></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">At the same time, I am also starting up a new research project, this time on the intimate economies of contemporary digital culture. Since I started my current position, in September 2012, I have become increasingly fascinated by the multiple ways in which monetary/financial and moral economies converge in the notion of value - particularly as it is being continually questioned, shored up, and reassembled through networked digital devices. How is value constructed online and how do the new measures that proliferate on the web inform how we take stock of our self-worth and the worth of others? How are economic rationales (such as those informed by financialization of employability) permeating the intimate connections we establish and cultivate daily? Conversely, how can articulations of intimacy be translated into popular measures for (e)valuating companies and/or judging the value of their 'intangible assets'?</font></div>
<div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">I the paper I will be presenting in New York is a first attempt to find answers to some of these questions, in this case focusing on what happens to (free) labor in our so-called information economy, where Marx's labor theory of value seems to have been rendered obsolete and relegated to the Trash folder of our laptops and iPads. Yet we continue to work, even if it often doesn't feel like work - let alone 'labor'. I propose that we take a closer look at how particular web devices (in this case Klout) produce what a call a "neoliberal subject of value", in order to get some grip on the radical reorganization of labor, value, and subjectivity accomplished by neoliberal reason and its theory of human capital. <br>
<span style="font-size:10pt"><br></span></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:10pt">I look forward to meeting you in November!</span></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:10pt"><br>
</span></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:10pt">Niels</span></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:10pt"> </span><span style="font-size:10pt"><br>
</span></font></div>
</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Mark Graham <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk" target="_blank">mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><font><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">Hi everyone,</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"></span><br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">I’d like to introduce myself (Mark Graham) and three of my colleagues (Isis Hjorth, Helena Barnard, and Vili Lehdonvirta). </span><br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"></span><br>
Dr <span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=169" target="_blank">Isis Hjorth</a> is a cultural sociologist focusing on emerging practices associated with networked technologies. In her PhD thesis - “Networked Cultural Production: Filmmaking in the Wreckamovie Community" (Hjorth, 2014) - Isis examined the conventions guiding the division of digital labour in crowdsourced films, and developed a typology of labour</span> <span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">orientations. She is now engaged with research on paid crowdsourcing and online work in low-income countries, working as as one of four researchers on the project "Microwork and Virtual Production Networks in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia”.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"></span><br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">Since obtaining her PhD in Management from Rutgers University, Prof <a href="http://www.gibs.co.za/faculty-and-research/faculty-and-research_1/faculty/dr-helena-barnard-.aspx" target="_blank">Helena Barnard</a> has been working at GIBS, University of Pretoria, in South Africa. Her research interests are in how knowledge (and with it technology, organisational practices and innovation) moves from more to less developed countries. She focuses both on organisational mechanisms (notably emerging multinationals) and individual mechanisms, especially the diaspora and scientific collaborations. The digital world is transforming how cross-national contact at both the organisational and individual levels takes place, and she is increasingly investigating how digitally-enabled processes and labour change engagement between high, middle and low income countries.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"></span><br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">Dr </span><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=320" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>Vili Lehdonvirta</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> is an economic sociologist and Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. His research focuses on the social, technical, and institutional underpinnings of digitally mediated markets, especially markets for online games, virtual currencies, and digital labour, and also on the social consequences of these markets. His book, </span><a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/virtual-economies" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> (with Edward Castronova) has just been published by MIT Press. His earlier publications include a report on the </span><a href="http://www.infodev.org/infodev-files/resource/InfodevDocuments_1056.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>market for microwork and game labour</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> and a qualitative study of </span><a href="http://dynamicsofvirtualwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/COST-Action-IS1202-Working-Paper-12.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>microworkers' occupational identity</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">. In terms of research approach, Lehdonvirta likes to mix observation and interviews with quantitative analyses of survey and log data.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"></span><br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=165" target="_blank">I'm</a> an Associate Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and a geographer whose work is broadly trying to understand the difference that connectivity makes at the world’s economic margins. I have previously studied topics like the geographies of voice, participation, and representation on Wikipedia (e.g. in </span><a href="http://www.zerogeography.net/2014/01/uneven-geographies-of-user-generated.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>this paper</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">), the </span><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/?id=59" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>role of changing connectivity</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> in the BPO sectors of Kenya and Rwanda, and the </span><a href="http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/?page=home" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>broader geographies of digital and augmented content</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> (here is a </span><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0435j93" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>link to a recent BBC talk</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> I gave on the topic). At the moment, I’m working on two broad projects. First, a three year project on “</span><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/?id=119" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>microwork and virtual production networks</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">” (this is what we’ll be speaking about in the New York conference). Second, a </span><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/?id=120" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>five-year project on ‘knowledge economies’ in Sub-Saharan Africa.</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> Here we plan to look at both micro tasks like call centres and microwork and rise of the quaternary sector as it is manifested through activities like web-development and mediated through institutions like ’innovation hubs.’ The ultimate point of all of this work is to better understand who benefits and who doesn’t from changing affordances and practices of digitally-mediated connectivity. </span><br>
<br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">Looking forward to continuing in New York.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">Mark (and Isis, Helena, and Vili)<br><br></span>
</font><div><div dir="ltr"><div>------------------------------------------</div><div>Dr Mark Graham</div><div><br></div><div>Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow </div><div>Oxford Internet Institute</div><div>University of Oxford</div>
<div><br></div><div><div>Research Fellow<br></div><div>Green Templeton College<br></div><div>University of Oxford</div><br>Visiting Research Associate</div><div>School of Geography and the Environment</div><div>University of Oxford</div>
<div> </div><div><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/graham" target="_blank">oii.ox.ac.uk/people/graham</a> | <a href="http://www.geospace.co.uk" target="_blank">geospace.co.uk</a> | <a href="http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk" target="_blank">Information Geographies</a> | <a href="http://www.wikichains.org" target="_blank">wikichains.org</a> | <a href="http://twitter.com/geoplace" target="_blank">@geoplace</a> | <a href="http://www.zerogeography.net/" target="_blank">zerogeography blog</a><br>
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