Nov
7
1:30 PM13:30

Workshop and Talk with Rahul Murkherjee, November 7th

Join us on November 7th for two exciting events, a publishing workshop and talk, with UPenn’s Rahul Mukherjee.

At the workshop Rahul will discuss publishing in peer review journals, the first book process, and his new book series - "Power Currents: Asian Media in the World" - at the University of Pittsburgh Press. 

His talk "Approaching the Limit: Aspirational Politics beyond mobile data plans," comes from work in his forthcoming book Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (MIT Press, Spring 2026). Here Mukherjee examines how telecom companies advertise their services of download speeds and seamless streaming as “unlimited,” but studying the distribution backends of mobile media infrastructures reveal that telcos tend to often brush up against “limits” that involve resolving storage and bandwidth bottlenecks. Exploring discourses of limits and limitlessness around telecom policies, financial technologies, phishing scams, and platform capitalism(s), this work examines how they draw the terms of inclusion and exclusion in India where one negotiates uneven geographies, linguistic differences, and gender-and-caste fault lines on an everyday basis.

Workshop: Nov 7th - 1:30-3:00pm, Global Emergent Media Lab, FB 630.15, 1250 Guy Street

Talk: Nov 7th - 4:00-5:30pm, Raah Lab, FB 630.17, 1250 Guy Street

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

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Platform Lab Report Launch & Roundtable with Rob Gorwa
Feb
14
12:00 PM12:00

Platform Lab Report Launch & Roundtable with Rob Gorwa

Platform Lab Report Launch

Join us to celebrate the release of our lab report on Platform Regulation. This report features a number of brief case studies from around the world investigating how governments are attempting to regulate platforms, as well as how platforms continue to regulate various aspects of social and cultural life. From platform lobbying to censorship to state funding, this report brings together a number of perspectives to examine the various dynamics of platform regulation at play today.

The launch will feature a roundtable with the report’s contributors, and we are also very excited to be joined by platform governance scholar Rob Gorwa from the WZB Berlin Social Science Center as a respondent.

We also strongly encourage you to read the report in advance, and welcome your questions and comments for our contributors!

Register here

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Platform Capitalisms (Feb. 15, 2023 / 5PM EST)
Feb
15
5:00 PM17:00

Platform Capitalisms (Feb. 15, 2023 / 5PM EST)

Platform Capitalisms: Featuring Adrian Athique & Lin Zhang

The Platform Lab's first event of 2023: Adrian Athique & Lin Zhang will discuss platform capitalisms!

Our guests Adrian Athique and Lin Zhang, both leaders in their fields, will join us via Zoom to discuss their latest research on platform capitalism(s) from non-Western perspectives, expanding our existing frameworks for platform analysis.

Register here.

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Mar
11
2:00 PM14:00

Workshop: Platform Problems

Platform Problems is meant as a connection between the Platform Lab and the DiGS Lab (Digital Intimacy, Gender, and Sexuality Lab). The participants were invited to help brainstorm around “platform problems” suggested by our presenters.

 

Marc Steinberg (Platform Lab director) and Stefanie Duguay (DiGS Lab director) have been brainstorming ideas for fostering connection across departments and labs while (and because) working remotely. This informal workshop, named “Platform Problems” happened with the participation of PhD students, who have overlaps in their research pertaining to technology, infrastructures, platforms, AI, etc. Each participant talked about their research for a short amount of time and presented a ‘problem’ of sorts – which could be something the students came up against in their research or a broader theoretical or analytical problem. Following this, a collective discussion happened to think through these problems.

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Symposium: Just-in-Time Platforms
Nov
9
1:00 PM13:00

Symposium: Just-in-Time Platforms

This symposium features the work of two scholars whose research offers close studies of just-in-time platforms, management, and labour: Dr. Rutvica Andrijasevic and Dr. Julie Yujie Chen.

 

The authors approach key instances of the industrial and service economies – labour mediators in electronics manufacturing in Central and Eastern Europe, and app-based food delivery platforms in China – to push media studies, platform studies, and management studies in new directions. In doing so, they offer insight on the future of just-in-time labour and just-in-time media that inevitably require attention to developments across various geographies. Highlighting the roles of Temporary Worker Agencies and government policies in the manufacture and operation of platforms, Dr. Andrijasevic and Dr. Chen focus our attention on labour’s mediations of and by platforms. Focusing on the making of the electronic devices that keep us working and the food delivery apps that keeps us fed, this symposium also sheds light on the platform-mediated, just-in-time logistics that have only become more essential and more visible under COVID-19.

 

Rutvica Andrijasevic, based at the University of Bristol (UK), is an activist scholar with research interests in international labour migration and business. Her texts on transnational production, labour migration and human trafficking have appeared in a variety of top international journals and edited volumes and have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Greek, Croatian and Mandarin.  

Julie Yujie Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology (ICCIT) and holds a graduate appointment at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the lead author of Super-sticky WeChat and Chinese Society (Emerald, 2018).

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