HCII PhD Thesis Defense - Cella Sum
When
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Description
Title: The Future of Labor: Designing for Resistance, Relationality, and Collective Power
Committee:
Sarah Fox (Chair), Carnegie Mellon University
Sauvik Das, Carnegie Mellon University
Kenneth Holstein, Carnegie Mellon University
Tamara Kneese, Partnership on AI
Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan
Zoom Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/43
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, the first part of my dissertation examines three case studies where the growing presence of surveillance technologies, data-driven systems, and AI in the workplace restructures labor conditions and how workers across sectors negotiate and respond to these exploitative structures through infrastructures of resistance, relationality, and collective power. By focusing on worker resistance as a critical site of inquiry, I position these acts not merely as reactive responses to inevitable technological change, but as forms of “futuring” through which more just and equitable labor conditions are imagined and enacted.
The second part of my dissertation examines how HCI researchers can support the "Future of Labor." First, I present insights from an expert review workshop evaluating the Workplace Surveillance Incident Tracker, a public platform that documents cases of workplace surveillance and provides worker-centered resources for capacity-building and taking action. I argue that HCI researchers must approach accountability not as a purely technical problem, but as infrastructure, foregrounding the relational and organizational conditions necessary to sustain worker-centered interventions. I then draw on Lisa Lowe’s concept of “Intimacies as Method” to reflect on the connections, tensions, and interdependencies across my studies. Through this lens, I further problematize dominant “Future of Work” discourses, speculate on possibilities for more just labor futures, and critically interrogate the role of the HCI researcher in these struggles. Taken together, this dissertation extends scholarship on worker-centered design by calling on HCI researchers to serve as active participants, rather than detached observers, in the labor movement.
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