Sarah Sharma (she/her), University of Toronto. Chair: Marlene Spanger.

This talk will draw insights from my forthcoming book Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Tech (Duke UP, 2026) and consider the relationship between technology and the patriarchal temporality of gig work in the city. In particular, I focus on how mundane technologies (smartphones, apps, Fitbits, assistive devices, AI companions, chatbots, digital assistants, water bottles with digital reminders, and sleep monitors) organize the temporal and spatial contours of the day in such a way that uphold a maternal mandate fundamental to the reproduction of patriarchy.

Together these technologies compose a media complex that includes machinic forms of care and intimacy, and constitute an unacknowledged gendered normativity tied to capital. While these technologies manage time and the mundane tasks of social reproduction, they also uphold a binarized and gendered division of labor in the absence of bodies. I ask how feminist machine logics might re-organize the temporal and spatial contours of the day. A feminist technological future demands, then, not a life free from the logic of machines, but rather a different set of machine logics—feminist techno-logics.

Olivia Butler (she/her), Uppsala University. Chair: Marlene Spanger.

Segmentation is central within Platform Economy; different sectors attract different workers under distinct spatio-temporal conditions, producing uneven experiences. While some benefit from flexibility, others face intensified precarity shaped by their position in the labour market. At the same time, gig work reshapes urban infrastructures, embedding new forms of labour and consumption into everyday life. I argue that Swedish platform capitalism constitutes a dialectically fractured labour regime, fragmenting life, labour, and the labour market itself, and reproducing inequality through spatial and temporal dislocation.

Upasana Bhattacharjee (they/them), University of Toronto. Chair: Marlene Spanger.

Major roads in Toronto see immigrant South Asian gig workers cluster and loiter in front of busy restaurants as they wait for other people’s orders; these public spaces become sites of migrant and masculine sociality. Waiting is embedded into their jobs. This presentation focuses on the figure of the “agent” who helps new migrant workers set up appropriate profiles on food delivery apps. In doing so, I discuss the tactics and myths - making more orders or bigger orders - that emerge when workers deal with opaque algorithmic managers. I use this insight from the field to talk about the (human) labour of mediation that makes different forms of mobilities possible.

Desirée Enlund (she/her), Linköping University. Chair: Kristina Zampoukos.

The entry of digital labour platforms into spheres that were formerly the remit of the public sector is transforming the work organization and labour markets of professional groups such as healthcare personnel, moving their work from in-place at a healthcare clinic to at a distance from home. At the same time, healthcare professionals in Sweden have a high degree of unionization and public sector restructuring has generated a politicization of caring with broad public support. However, when interviewing trade union and interest organization representatives of medical professionals in Sweden, they largely displayed a disinterest in the members who are platform workers. This raises questions around union strategies in the meeting of the public sector and the platform economy as well as what this means for the social reproduction of the trade union for professionals at large.

Giorgio Pirina (he/him). Chair: Kristina Zampoukos.

Over the past decade, critical scholarship on the platform-mediated gig economy has documented tensions in labour processes, racialised hierarchies, and the distinctly urban geography of platform capitalism. This talk pays attention to the platform-fulfilment city’s infrastructural core: data centers. In line with critical data centre studies, I conceptualise data centres as a critical node of the digital–material entanglement. These are sites where algorithmic management and coordination, just-in-time logistics, and on-demand services are sustained by round-the-clock labour, electricity-intensive operations, and water-dependent cooling. Tracing their co-location with logistics corridors, grid assets and land-use politics, I develop an account of how platform-fulfilment city is hard-wired into the energy and maintenance work that keeps digital services continuously available.