The event will be held in English and it will take place at H18:00, Central European Time (CET).
Please register online to participate.

Into a logistical world: platform capitalism, digital labor, and platform labor 

The talk will start by discussing the development of logistics over the past decades and by explaining the crucial role it plays in the working and logics of contemporary capitalism. It will then focus on the emergence of digital platforms and “platform capitalism” in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/2008. Digital platforms will be described as instantiations of a logistical rationality, and their operations will be critically discussed from the angle of their implications in a wide range of fields (from urban spaces to governmentality, from social reproduction to lifestyles). The last part of the talk will be dedicated to the issue of labor, with a focus on the different although connected notions of digital and platform labor. The very idea of a “standard” labor relation is challenged and tested by the operations of digital platforms, which also provide a lens for an analysis of the transformations currently reshaping labor writ large.

With the participation of Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna) and Giulia Scotto (Fellow Roma Calling 2020/2021).

Biographies:

Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna and is adjunct fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society of the Western Sydney University. He has been visiting professor and research fellow in several places. His recent work has centered on the relations between globalization, migration and capitalism, on contemporary capitalism as well as on postcolonial criticism. He participates in the ‘post-workerist’ debates being one of the founders of the website www.euronomade.info. Among his books: Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (2006), La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale (2008), Nei cantieri marxiani. Il soggetto e la sua produzione (2014; English edition In the Marxian Workshops, 2018) and Un mondo da guadagnare. Per una teoria politica del presente (2020). With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013) and of The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019).

Giulia Scotto (1985, Turin) obtained an MA in Architecture of the City at the University of Venice in 2011. She worked as an architect, urban planner, and researcher in Zurich and in Rotterdam, as well as a consultant for urban and territorial projects. Since 2017 she has been a research assistant at the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Basel. In Rome she is working on her doctoral thesis on the architecture and infrastructure of ENI in sub-Saharan Africa and on a documentary on the Agip Motel in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Find out more about Giulia Scotto’s project, read her latest contribution on the blog of Istituto Svizzero on the website of the Swiss daily newspaper Le Temps.