Data Bodies at Work

Abstract

For two centuries, institutions have turned our intimate bodily details into statistics in order to take them apart and put more productive versions back together. But a qualitative shift, carried out through intensive data-monitoring, is underway as smartphones, wearable technology, and the Internet of Things become ubiquitous. Employers are looking for and holding on to not just more data, but different data: about health, emotions, gossip--all more easily stored and moved than even a decade ago. We know that workers, patients, and others have historically resisted intimate measurement for fear of a loss of autonomy. Interrupting that has meant hiding, faking, deleting, destroying and bargaining over data.

Our panel diagnoses today’s struggles over technologies of intimate measurement. Each paper explores new innovations in the collection of bodily data, asking what productivity means there, how it is measured, with what tools, to what ends, and with what sort of resistance or negotiation on the part of the measured. Greene and Clegg’s interviews with college athletes explore the gap between the data gathered about them and their knowledge of it, asking how that gap is used as a training tool today and how it might become an opportunity for empowerment tomorrow. Ajunwa develops a theoretical framework for the adoption of wearable tech, giving an organizational context to narratives of dataveillance that are too often either individualized or abstracted. Gregory’s research with the Scottish Trade Unions Congress and Deliveroo riders presents a new form of workers’ inquiry--’worker data observatories’--that extend beyond the bounds of traditional work sites. Finally, Wissinger studies designers and early adopters of wearable biotech, revealing the deeply gendered assumptions built into cutting-edge technologies that position bodily data as an extractable resource.

Individual Presentations

• Putting Student-Athletes’ Data to Work - Daniel Greene, University of Maryland; Tamara Clegg, University of Maryland

• Theorizing the Adoption and Governance of Wearable Tech in the Workplace - Ifeoma Ajunwa, Cornell IRL School

• Data-Driven Unionising - Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh

• All Your Data Are Belong to Us: Attitudes in Design Cultures Where Wearables are Moving Toward Biotech - Elizabeth Wissinger, City University Of New York Graduate Center/BMCC

Session Organizer

• Daniel Greene, University of Maryland