The Vitalities Lab, a research group at UNSW Sydney, has recently launched a webinar series called ‘Breaking Methods‘. These videos are prepared by Vitalities researchers and focus on creative methods that ‘break the mould’. There are currently eight videos on their YouTube channel, “using a ‘voice-over’ plus slides, presenters give Read more…
Karen Gregory and Miguel Paredes Maldonado’s new article Delivering Edinburgh: uncovering the digital geography of platform labour in the city is now available in Volume 23, Issue 8 of Information, Communication & Society. Gregory and Maldonado look at the “unseen and obscured cycling routes of on-demand , app-based food couriers Read more…
A new research cluster was launched at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Data, Culture & Society recently. The Digital Social Science Cluster is a methods lab led by MSc Digital Society co-coordinator Dr Karen Gregory, lecturer in Data & Society Dr Morgan Currie and TRAIN@ED postdoctoral fellow Dr Kate Read more…
As requested, here are the slides from my annual “Discrimination In/Of Tech” lecture and additional reading list for the class. As I have suggested elsewhere, one class is really not enough to do justice to this topic. October 18, 2018: Equality & Technology_Gregory_2018 from karengregory2000 And from last year, November Read more…
Pushed and Pulled to the Internet: Self Employment in the Spiritual Marketplace Drawing from participant observation and in-depth interviews, this article illustrates how esoteric practitioners (mainly Tarot card readers) come to see themselves as “self-employed” or entrepreneurs and take up the labor of brand building. These individuals study and use Read more…
I’m always happy to speak with Caroline O’Donovan about digital labor issues, including her latest piece on how freelancers using Upwork and other platforms are surveilled: “We seem to think that ‘flexibility’ is the same thing as autonomy, and it’s not,” University of Edinburgh digital sociologist Karen Gregory told BuzzFeed News. “Autonomy Read more…
Many thanks to Christopher Till for inviting me to chat with him for his Digital Sociology podcast series: Christopher is pulling together a great collection of Digital Sociology discussions, which can be heard here: https://thisisnotasociology.blog/
A new article in the The National includes reference to Dr. Karen Gregory’s recent talk at the STUC Youth Conference, which took place in Clydebank on July 1st. “At the weekend I heard a presentation by Edinburgh University sociologist Dr Karen Gregory. It was addressed specifically to young trade unionists and I Read more…
Anyone with an interest in the study of online communities, digital society, and life on digital platforms is warmly invited to the new ‘Edinburgh Digital Life’ Group. There are a large number of scholars across the University who study these fields from a variety of disciplinary angles and through many Read more…
Sociology PhD Student, Justin Ho, will be coordinating the ‘Edinburgh Text Analysis Research Group’. The first meeting will take place on Friday, April 27th at 4pm in 1.16 Practice Suite in the CMB. This group will provide postgraduate students and academics with a platform to discuss projects, issues and ideas Read more…