In this talk, I present an overview of my work in the past 15 years, which grapples with understanding and accounting for how and why workers might be invisible at work. From women domestic workers working in the informal economy whose work is unregistered and unrecognised to AI data workers whose work is assumed to be ephemeral and part of machines making decisions in the digital economy, invisibility at work is a question about worker’s agency, choices, and resistance at work. I also look at how not all invisibility is equal, and how some workers due to their gender, race, economic and social status, as well as geography, are more invisible than others. I then reflect on whether invisibility could be a choice, or it is a trap for workers, pushing them to the bottom of the employment hierarchy.

Speaker's Info:

Funda Ustek Spilda is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities, and is the South East Asia Programmes Lead. She is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford; and Fairwork, an international action research project that studies the impact of technology on work. She holds a D.Phil in Sociology from the University of Oxford.