The Sage Handbook of Digital Labour

This timely volume lays out in expansive detail the scope of digital labour studies–a field that draws from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives and a multiplicity of sites, both geographical and conceptual. By going beyond the confines of a technological definition of digital labour, the essays in the volume point to the many ways in which work shaped by digital infrastructures–in terms of form, place, product, and governance–needs to be studied and understood, if we are to re-imagine and mobilize for a just future of work.

Ergin Bulut is Senior Lecturer in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He researches in the areas of political economy of media and cultural industries, videogame studies, and philosophy of technology. He is the author of “A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry” (Cornell UP, 2020).

Julie Yujie Chen is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology (ICCIT) at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the co-author of Media and Management (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and Super-sticky WeChat and Chinese Society (Emerald, 2018). She is also a founding editor of Platforms & Society. Her research explores the transformation of work and worker′s subjectivity in relation to digital technology, capitalism, and globalisation.

Rafael Grohmann is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies) at the University of Toronto. He is leader of DigiLabour initiative and Research Associate at the University of Oxford. He is leading projects on worker-owned platforms, digital solidarity economies in Latin America, data work, cultural labor and artificial intelligence (AI). He is also a founding editor of Platforms & Society.

Kylie Jarrett is Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. She is author of Digital Labor (2002, Polity), Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (2016, Routledge) and co-author of #NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (2019, MIT Press) and Google and the Culture of Search (2013, Routledge) along with various studies of the digital political economy. She is also editor of Dialogues on Digital Society.