Research

Craft Workers Organize: Working Conditions and Industrial Mythologies in the Artisan Economy

Arising out of my doctoral research, this project interrogates work in so-called craft industries. Motivated by the methodological orientation of workers' inquiry, the project weighs the craft labour process and its industrial mythologies against the experiences and attitudes of craft workers. Adding a particularly material dimension to studies of cultural work and digital labour, this research considers why young workers increasingly gravitate toward hands-on forms of work in the face of pervasive cultural assumptions about the digital economy. Furthermore, it reports on workers' attempts to challenge exploitative and abusive conditions through collective action.

Building Autonomous Power: Solidarity Networks and Militancy in Times of Crisis

Building upon my work with workers in Canada's craft brewing sector, "Building Autonomous Power" is a collective project with workers and organizers in a number of autonomous labour solidarity networks. Considering the rise in worker organizing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the project analyzes worker organizations that exist outside of or at arms length from formal unions and considers the efficacy of such an approach to worker organizing.

Platform Hospitality: Social Media, Identity and Worker Organizing

As workers in a number of service and hospitality industries continue to organize, it is imperative that we understand what techniques and tactics they have used to build successful campaigns. As an industry that valorizes diversity and political engagement, hospitality has proven particularly susceptible to workers' militant action, particularly as workers have opted for highly public, socially mediated demonstrations of their collective power. This project explores the intersection between emerging working subjectivities in service and hospitality and the kinds of political and technical efficacies that workers commonly mobilize in building solidarity within the same.

Celebrating Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital

This year, 2024, marks the 50 year anniversary of the publication of Harry Braverman's classic, Labor and Monopoly Capital. To mark this occasion and prompt discourse over the book's continued influence, I am co-editing with Steff Hui Cui Ling and Enda Brophy a special issue of New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry. The issue is set to be published in the autumn of 2024.