The Future of AI-impacted Work: Digital Ethnographic State of the Art
A conversation with Prof. dr Nancy Baym (Microsoft Research Labs, USA) and Prof. dr Payal Arora (Utrecht Uni, founding director of FEMlab).
When: 9 December 2024 | 3:30-5:00 p.m. CET
Where: Utrecht University, Muntstraat 2A, 0.04
ECTS: 2-4 EC. More information about credits and assignments, see below
Coordinator: Prof. dr Annette Markham (Utrecht University)
Organisation: Prof. dr Annette Markham, Department of Media and culture Studies (Utrecht University) and RMeS
For: PhD Candidates and RMa students in Media Studies, who are a member of a Dutch Graduate Research School (onderzoekschool). RMeS staff and other interested colleagues are welcome to sit in on specific sessions.
Registration via THIS LINK. IMPORTANT NOTE: When registering, please specify at ‘remarks’ if you want to attend IN PERSON or ONLINE.
This seminar is part of the RMeS Digital Ethnography Seminar Series 2024: Tools, Ethics, Futures. More information can be found here.
The Future of AI-impacted Work: State of the Art Research and Approaches
AI-based technologies continue to introduce fundamental changes in how work gets done. How can digital ethnography be mobilized to study these transformations and impact better ethical futures of work? This session begins with the premise that the introduction of AI into any organization is an inherently sociotechnical process, whereby people influence technology just as technology influences people. From a social science perspective, this means that AI-entangled ecosystems are lived contexts, filled with meaning and expectation that shape whether and how technologies are adapted and with what consequences, as Baym and Ellison note (2023).
This session of the 2024 Digital Ethnography Research Series at Utrecht University brings together two world-leading researchers using ethnographic approaches to study AI, Futures, and Work. Their methods and projects are diverse, including studying AI industries using ethnographic sensibilities, analyzing how the construction of AI is being rhetorically framed, bringing attention to global south perspectives, exploring the sociotechnical interplay in development of AI, researching how language models and deployment frameworks can be more inclusive, and understanding how AI is being localized in specific companies. Across these cases, both Nancy Baym and Payal Arora demonstrate how an ethnographic sensibility provides valuable insights into how people frame and navigate these systems, highlighting the diverse ways in which AI is embraced, resisted, or adapted across different settings.
Nancy Baym is Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, USA. She studies how people understand and act with new communication technologies in their relationships. Baym is currently working on AI and the future of work, using a mix of qualitative and ethnographically inspired methods. A pioneer in the field of internet research, Baym wrote some of the earliest articles about online community in the early 1990s. With Jean Burgess, she is the author of
Twitter: A Biography (2020, NYU). Other books include
Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (2018, NYU), Personal Connections in the Digital Age (2010, Second Edition 2014, Polity), Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method (co-edited with Annette Markham, 2010, Sage), and Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (2000, Sage).
Payal Arora is a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and co-founder of
FemLab, a feminist futures of work initiative and the
Inclusive AI Lab. Arora has more than two decades of research related to user-experience among underrepresented groups, especially in the Global South. She is the author of award-winning books including
The Next Billion Users with Harvard Press. Forbes called her the ‘next billion champion’ and the ‘right kind of person to reform tech’. About 150 international media outlets have covered her work including The BBC, Financial Times, and The Economist. She sits on several advisory boards including for the Affect Lab, AI Film Fest, UN EGOV, LIRNE-Asia, UNESCO etc. Her new book
From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech is now out with MIT Press and Harper Collins. She is Indian, American, and Irish, and currently lives in Amsterdam.
Recommended Readings
Baym, N., & Ellison, N. B. (2023). Toward work’s new futures: Editor’s Introduction to Technology and Future of Work special issue. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 28(4). DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad031Butler, J., Jaffe, S., Baym, N., Czerwinski, M., Iqbal, S., Nowak, K., Rintel, R., Sellen, A., Vorvoreanu, M., Hecht, B., and Teevan, J. (Eds.). Microsoft New Future of Work Report 2023. Microsoft Research Tech Report MSRTR-2023-34 (
https://aka.ms/nfw2023), 2023
https://aka.ms/nfw2023
Credits:
To earn ECTS credit for this series, students in RMA or PhD programs may choose from the following options:
2 ECTS: Attend five of the six Seminar sessions. No further requirements
4 ECTS: Attend four of the six seminar sessions. In advance of each session attended, students should prepare and upload to a designated course folder a single PDF document that comprises four questions, based on the reading materials, that could be posed to one or both of the featured speakers. Each question should be framed or situated by a short (approx 600-750 words) blogpost style essay that provides background on why or how the question is relevant and more specifically, how it is derived from the student’s personal reading and comprehension of the materials provided/suggested for each seminar session. Other source material may be added. (total word count per seminar attended is 2400-3000 words. Over the course of the entire series, the student will produce 9200-12000 words). Expression of ideas in a blogpost style post indicates that informal, first person writing style is allowed. Within this, proper citations and a consistent citation style should be used. Essays are evaluated as Pass/Fail, on the basis of completion and evidence of basic comprehension. Students should not expect any feedback from the facilitator on content.
