This event is being hosted by the College of Social Science Interdisciplinary Research Theme: Digital Society and Economy

Participatory Investigations - Workers as Futurist

The Worker as Futurist project supports rank-and-file Amazon workers to write and publish short, specualtive fiction stories about “the world after Amazon.” That corporation not only dominates online retail and web services, it actively seeks to “disrupt” sectors from health care to groceries, from film and television to logistics and robotics, animated by its executives' science fiction-fuelled dreams. But workers pay the price, and have no say in the future they are made to build, which for most will be a dystopia. Around the world, workers are rising up against Amazon and similar corporations, but what kind of future do workers want? 

About our speaker:

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).

About the Innovative Methods Seminar series:

Our workshops run for 50 min. each with time for presentation and Q&A. We will have one speaker per each event and all events will be hosted online, via Zoom. Every speaker will share their digital methodology/methods and the project in which the methodology was applied or developed, with a particular focus on the innovative aspects of that methodology, including benefits, challenges, ethical dimensions, challenges, etc. The audience for these workshops are members of the Digital Society and Economy Interdisciplinary Research Theme, including peer scholars and doctoral students.