Behind the facade
In 2024, I visited Amsterdam to attend the joint meeting of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S). I presented on the panel Digital Ghost Work: Human Presences in AI Transformations, convened by Roger Andre Søraa, Yana Boeva, Hendrik Heuer, and Milagros Miceli.
Behind the facade: Locating the human labour within streetside retail automation documented the use of digital interfaces, architecture, and onsite branding to downplay the presence of human labour and reinforce specific, lucrative sociotechnical imaginaries within unstaffed retail in North America. It drew from my ongoing fieldwork in Toronto, Ontario and accompanying data visualization project, Toronto 14–24.
To learn more about my research on retail automation, check out Who gets behind when Toronto automates?, a story map created for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative at U of T.