INDL 8 conference
Contesting Digital Labor: Resistance, counter-uses, and new directions for research
10-12 September 2025, Bologna






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.

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
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).

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
- 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
- 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:
- Have a maximum length of 400 words
- Be written in English
- Be submitted through the conference management system SciencesConf
- 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
- 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