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<div style="direction: ltr;font-family: Tahoma;color: #000000;font-size: 10pt;">At last someone is raising the really important issues about Uber. Read the abstract.
<div>-Greg Michalenko<br>
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<div id="divRpF487990" style="direction: ltr;"><font face="Tahoma" size="2" color="#000000"><b>From:</b> env-faculty-bounces@lists.uwaterloo.ca [env-faculty-bounces@lists.uwaterloo.ca] on behalf of Heather Dorken [hdorken@uwaterloo.ca]<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Thursday, April 07, 2016 9:11 AM<br>
<b>To:</b> env-faculty@lists.uwaterloo.ca<br>
<b>Subject:</b> [env-faculty] Revised - Geography and Environment Faculty Search - Daniel Cockayne<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA" style="color:black">Dear colleagues, </span>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA" style="color:black">Please join us for a research seminar with Daniel Cockayne, who is interviewing for an Assistant Professor position in GEM. Daniel expects to defend his PhD in Geography at the University of Kentucky
this coming June. Daniel’s CV can be viewed in Heather Dorken’s office (EV1-115). The seminar will be held from 10:00-11:30 in EV1-221 on Friday, April 15. We will provide coffee and cookies.</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="color:#222222">“Does Uber own the cars now?” The normalization of insecure work in San Francisco’s digital media sector</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA">Abstract </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#222222; background:white">In this presentation I argue that work in San Francisco’s digital media sector is structured by both the short termism of financial technologies such as venture capital that make demands of
exponential growth and fast returns on investment and the intense personal commitment individuals display to the their firm and product. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in San Francisco with entrepreneurs, software developers, and other workers, I
argue that equity-financed small businesses in this sector reproduce and romanticize insecure and uncertain working conditions for themselves and others. Negative impacts of work are balanced against the perceived (if not real) benefits of working for small
businesses, such as personal autonomy and control over one’s work, high status and respect, and the desire for glamorous working environments. Through interviews with workers, I analyze how individuals justify their own submission to un- or under-paid and
stressful work, long working hours, and considerable economic risk. I also examine how entrepreneurs impose insecure working conditions on others. I use the example of the ‘on-demand’ or, as it is more colloquially known, sharing economy to demonstrate how
labor is devalued through the consistent framing of this work as ‘social’ rather than ‘economic,’ the imposition of punitive and disciplinary peer-review systems, and the prevalent legal classification of workers as contractors rather than employees in the
U.S. context. I frame my findings within cultural and feminist economic geography, the geographies of work and labor, and critical studies of technology in geography to argue that the workplace is a primary site not only for the reproduction of particular
systems of economic accumulation, but also the communication of power relations that reproduce hegemonic standards of work, and normative models of behavior.</span><span lang="EN-CA" style="color:black"> </span><span lang="EN-CA" style="color:#1F497D"></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA" style="color:black">Hope to see you there,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA" style="color:black">Johanna</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA" style="">Johanna Wandel<br>
Associate Professor<br>
Interim Chair, Geography and Environmental Management<br>
University of Waterloo, Waterloo ON N2L 3G1</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-CA" style="">519 – 888 – 4567 ext. 38669</span></p>
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