HCII PhD Thesis Proposal: Cella Sum
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall (NSH) 3305
Description
The Future of Labor: Designing for Resistance, Relationality, and Collective Power
Cella Sum
HCII PhD Thesis Proposal
Date & Time: Tuesday, August 26 at 1pm EST
Location: Newell-Simon Hall (NSH) 3305
Zoom Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/97160363246
Committee:
Sarah Fox (Chair), Carnegie Mellon University
Sauvik Das, Carnegie Mellon University
Kenneth Holstein, Carnegie Mellon University
Tamara Kneese, Data & Society
Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan
Abstract:
Dominant narratives around the "Future of Work" often frame AI, automation, and other emerging technologies as inevitable, solely focusing on their impact on workers rather than critically examining the forces driving their development. This perspective has led to technologies that aim to facilitate human-technology partnerships, augment human abilities, enhance worker productivity, and even promote worker wellbeing. However, embedded within many of these initiatives are corporate logics that ultimately lead to increased worker exploitation, surveillance, and managerial control. In response, workers engage in everyday acts of resistance and collective action to challenge these exploitative structures and reimagine and construct alternative labor futures.
This dissertation calls for a shift from the "Future of Work" to the "Future of Labor," a reorientation that centers workers not as a passive subject of technological change but as a proactive force in shaping more just and sustainable futures. To illustrate this, my dissertation examines three cases where workers across different sectors employ diverse tactics to reshape their workplaces and challenge dominant narratives. First, I examine how workers resist highly surveilled and fissured workplaces by leveraging online communities such as Reddit to share tactics, foster solidarity, and build political consciousness. Second, I explore how workers within community-based organizations in the U.S. engage in translation as a relational practice, reconfiguring extractive technological systems to advocate for their communities and sustain culturally grounded forms of care. Finally, I focus on how U.S.-based tech workers build collective power by organizing across job roles and forming cross-sector and transnational coalitions that challenge dominant ideologies of individualism and meritocracy in the tech industry. By centering these worker-led infrastructures, I call for HCI researchers to embrace a "Future of Labor" framework that supports solidarity and collective action, draws on past histories, and co-creates labor futures rooted in collective wellbeing.
In my proposed work, I will examine how communities in Pennsylvania understand, navigate, and contest the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and data centers in the region. Through speculative participatory design workshops, I will work with residents, unions, and grassroots organizations to co-design alternative labor futures. By bringing together diverse stakeholders, I aim to amplify more community-driven visions of labor that go beyond the confines of the workplace. Taken together, this dissertation extends scholarship on worker-centered design by framing labor as a relational, community-sustaining practice, serving as a generative site of speculative world-making through which more just futures can be envisioned and enacted.
Best,
Cella