INDL 8 conference

Contesting Digital Labor: Resistance, counter-uses, and new directions for research

10-12 September 2025, Bologna

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Submissions are now closed, but registrations are open!
The conference is free of charge for participants, but registration is mandatory. 

Keynote Speakers

María Luz Rodríguez

Property rights and monetisation of the personal data of platform workers.

Luz Rodríguez is Professor of Labour Law  at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (España) and leads the research for the European project GDPoweR-Recovering workers data for the negotiate and monitor collectivive agreements in the platform economy. She has worked for the International Labour Organisation as a Senior Specialist in Labour Market Institutions and has prepared the global report ‘Decent work in the platform economy’ for this organisation. She is the author of over 200 publications, the latest of which is her book Labour Law and Decent Work in the Platform Economy (Routledge 2025). She is considered one of the leading experts in research on the impact of technology on work and social protection, particularly in relation to workers’ digital rights and work in the platform economy.

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Sarah Roberts

The Hydra of Artificial Intelligence: Labor Devaluation and Erosion of Human Agency

Abstract: AI is a shapeshifting beast that assumes different configurations according to context and audience, creating a barrier to the development of unified opposition strategies. Its polymorphic nature recalls the mythical Hydra of Lerna, whose multiple heads regrew when severed, symbolizing the impossibility of definitively neutralizing the threat through conventional approaches. Prof. Sarah T. Roberts analyzes AI not as neutral technological innovation but as a systematic mechanism for labor devaluation. Within capitalism, the primary objective of this technology consists in progressively reducing labor costs toward zero, utilizing automation as its main instrument. This tendency inscribes itself within broader dynamics of marginalization affecting millions, categorized as migrants, refugees, and minorities, excluded from formal labor markets and progressively criminalized. The present state of AI generates a fundamental structural contradiction: while the technology promises to replace human labor, its implementation simultaneously requires an enormous workforce of content moderators, data cleaners, algorithmic adversarial trainers, and human feedback providers. These workers represent the system’s core paradox. The Hydra that should eliminate human labor feeds precisely on such labor to perpetuate its existence. This contradiction raises critical questions about the potential for resistance within AI systems themselves. Does the mass of workers necessary for AI operation constitute both the system’s material base and its possible dialectical negation? Can the material conditions of AI production generate forms of organized opposition capable of transcending the sectoral and geographical fragmentation that characterizes contemporary digital labor?

Sarah T. Roberts is a Professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies). She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2019), was released in paperback with a new preface in 2021, and in translation in French (2020) and in Mandarin (2023).

Sandro Mezzadra

Beyond Resistance. Digital Labor, Social Cooperation, and Infrastructural Struggles

Abstract: Engaging with the challenges and resistance surrounding digital labor may benefit from a theoretical approach to platform capitalism that emphasizes the infrastructural dimension of the operations of digital platforms. While there is a need to focus attention of the proliferation of labor conflicts in the digital world, this infrastructural dimension points to the crucial relevance of wider circuits of social cooperation as sources of value in contemporary capitalism. Working with such concepts as “potential labor,” exploitation, dispossession, and extraction I will raise a set of questions on the ways in which digital labor conflicts can be articulated with more general social struggles to foreshadow a reappropriation of wealth and power as the material horizon for a new politics of liberation.

Sandro Mezzadra works as a Professor of Political Theory, Università di Bologna, Department of Arts, Italy. Among his books: Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (with Brett Neilson, 2013), The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (with Brett Neilson, 2019), Bolivia beyond the Impasse (with Michael Hardt, 2023), The Rest and the West. Capital and Power in a Multipolar World (with Brett Neilson, 2024).
 
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Plenary panel: Emerging and legacy unionization for digital workers

Beyond Resistance. Digital Labor, Social Cooperation, and Infrastructural Struggles

The second day of the conference will feature a special panel on unions and digital workers, featuring local union leaders in conversation with global activists.

Joan Kinyua (Data Labelers Association)

President of the Data Labeler Association, Joan Kinyua is a digital rights activist focusing on empowering individuals and communities by ensuring their voices are heard in conversations about AI policies, digital labor, and the future of work.

Felipe Corredor Álvarez (Riders x Derechos)

Felipe Corredor Álvarez is a former Deliveroo rider in Barcelona, he co-founded and serves as spokesperson for the activism platform Riders x Derechos, working hand in hand with unions denouncing the dangers of uberization and pushing for improvements in labor regulation. He is also part of the Observatory of Work, Algorithm and Society (TAS), which analyzes the impact of algorithmic management on labor rights, pushing for lawsuits and regularization of workers. He holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and lectures at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Contesting Digital Labor: Resistance, counter-uses, and new directions for research

Bologna, 10-12 September, 2025

The International Digital Labor Network (INDL) is pleased to announce its eighth annual conference, which will be held at the University of Bologna, Italy, on September 10-12, 2025. INDL conferences provide a unique opportunity to share knowledge and new perspectives in research and practice related to digital labor. Broadly understood, the scope of this concept encompasses unpaid work on social media, paid work mediated by digital platforms (both location-based and online), formal employment in technology industries, and even traditional occupations that have undergone processes of digitization, platformization, and intensive use of big data and artificial intelligence. Each year, the organizers of the conference propose an overarching theme on which to particularly encourage submissions, as a way to reflect the rich diversity of views on this multifaceted object, to consolidate existing knowledge, and to highlight new ways forward.
 
The theme of this year, “Contesting digital labor,” builds on the observation that the recent rise of digital labor parallels an unprecedented surge of forms of individual and collective resistance in multiple geographies and settings. The strikes of delivery riders in Latin America, the unionization of content moderators in Africa, the organization of data workers and social media influencers in Europe, accompany emerging and more informal initiatives of mutualism and solidarity as well as everyday acts of individual resistance. Digital labor is becoming a key site of contestation for the future of work and of technological development.
 
The conference aims to explore a fundamental contradiction of digital labor. On the one hand, algorithms and digital technologies shape a new labor regime characterized by data extraction, widespread surveillance, and strict control on workers, which result in the fragmentation, individualization and casualization of jobs.  On the other hand, digital labor also brings about an unexpected resurgence of labor conflicts. Most protests have been worker-led or initiated by grassroots organizations, while traditional trade unions have taken a leading role in some cases. Informal, sometimes individual actions of resistance have become increasingly common, in addition to formal, collective mobilizations. Some interventions have involved counter-uses of digital means in the workplace, for example through the creation of apps, tools, and software with the explicit aim of enabling workers to understand and reformulate their working conditions. In this perspective, digital affordances are open to interpretations, uses and practices that not only escape platforms’ surveillance but also establish social relationships other than those of labor exploitation, thereby undermining the efficacy of platforms’ power. This evidence suggests that digital platforms may not have an exclusive power to shape the digital age, and that workers, individually and collectively, can radically transform the trajectories of technological development.
 
Uncovering the richness of collective and individual contestation practices that are emerging at the core of platform capitalism is essential to grasp the recent transformations of labor and the broader tendencies that are reshaping the digital age. This means looking at workers’ struggles not only as an object of research, but also as a crucial moment in which new knowledge is produced. Contestations reveal the reasons of workers’ grievances, grounded in their daily experiences, identities, skills, and aspirations. They bring to light aspects of labor organization and power asymmetries that would otherwise remain invisible, thereby potentially challenging the narratives of platforms. They allow comparing and contrasting the viewpoints of workers to those of intermediaries and clients, bringing more voices into the debate. Valuing this knowledge is a key goal of INDL-8 and an essential step to understand the current challenges and future perspectives of digital labor.
 
This conference seeks to examine how platform workers navigate, challenge, and reshape algorithmic management systems while forging innovative forms of solidarity and collective action. It also aims to reflect on the perspectives that technological developments open for workers in order to escape everyday surveillance, to resist top-down control and to organize to defend their rights.  
 
For this purpose, this year’s INDL-8 conference invites submissions along four “Current topics” that explore these issues: 
  • Emerging forms of individual and collective action in digitally mediated work
  • Workers’ resistance to algorithms
  • Technology as a tool for worker organizing and collective action
  • Legal frameworks, regulatory initiatives, and institutional responses
 
Four more “Legacy topics” have been introduced, focusing on subjects that previously garnered substantial interest from conference presenters:
  • Algorithmic management and labor control
  • Platform cooperativism and alternative business models
  • Platformisation and precariousness
  • Gender and digital labor

We also welcome submissions for a “Starting Topics” series, focusing on three emerging and currently under-researched areas that have the potential to drive meaningful progress in the field:

  • the psycho-social and health-related risks of platform work
  • the environmental challenges appertaining to digital labor
  • the experiences, identities, purposes and viewpoints of the other “side” of the platforms, composed by clients and employers.

We invite contributions from both confirmed and more junior academic researchers (also including PhD students), and from all professionals involved in the study of these themes, also including labor organizers and other practitioners. All disciplines involved in the study of labor and/or technology are welcome, for example economics, management, political science, law, sociology, psychology, history, geography, science & technology (STS) studies, media studies, design, and computer science.

Submission Guidelines:

To submit, please click on the button above or visit: https://indl-8.sciencesconf.org/
Abstracts should:
  • Have a maximum length of 400 words
  • Be written in English
  • Be submitted through the conference management system SciencesConf
Please remember to specify:
  • Your name and affiliation
  • Title
  • Abstract (including research objective, methodology, main findings and/or theoretical development, and where relevant, contribution to understanding worker organizing and resistance in digital labor)
  • Through a drop-down menu, you will be asked to choose from among one of the 11 topics mentioned above (the four Current, the four Legacy, and the three Starting).
  • You have the option to add a comment or a supporting file if needed.


Abstract submission deadline: April 27, 2025.
Submissions extended until May 5, 2025

Notification of acceptance: June 4, 2025
 
This edition of the INDL-8 conference is organized through a collaborative partnership between the University of Bologna, Fondazione Di Vittorio, and the International Labor Organization (ILO).
 
Information regarding the following will be published soon on the conference website:
  • Registration fees and discounts
  • Scholarships for Registration
  • Scholarships for lodging and meals
  • Logistical information

INDL-8 program

Practical Information about Bologna

INDL-8 Scientific Committee

Amir Anwar, University of Edinburgh UK
Antonio Casilli, IPP France
Federico Chicchi, Università di Bologna Italy
Mariana Fernández Massi, CONICET Argentina
Alessandro Gandini, Università di Milano Italy
Rafael Grohmann, University of Toronto Canada
Francisca Gutiérrez, UACh Chile
Julieta Longo, CONICET Argentina
Marco Marrone, Università del Salento Italy
Mila Miceli, Weizenbaum Institut Germany
Ivana Pais, Università Cattolica Italy
Manolis Patiniotis, NKUA Greece
Maurilio Pirone, Università di Bologna Italy
Julian Posada, Yale University USA
Valeria Pulignano, KU Leuven Belgium
Uma Rani, ILO Switzerland
Myriam Raymond, Université d’Angers France
Diego  Rivera, FAIR Chile
Antonio Stecher, UDP Chile
Paola Tubaro, CNRS France
Alan Valenzuela, UAH Chile
Matheus Viana Braz, UEM Brazil
Iraklis Vogiatzis, NKUA Greece

INDL-8 Keynotes