Funda Ustek-Spilda
Biographic Data
| ID | 188100 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Funda Ustek-Spilda |
| GIVEN NAMES | Funda |
| FAMILY NAME | Ustek-Spilda |
| SIGNATURE | USTEK-SPILDA F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8781-8646 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 156 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Between acceptance and resistance
Digital labour platforms are transforming labour markets worldwide, and migrant workers are pivotal in this transformation. Drawing on a qualitative study in Chile, we uncover how Latin American and Caribbean migrants navigate and resist platform labour conditions, considering the algorithmically controlled and surveilled aspects of food delivery platforms, as well as the impact of migration status on their work. We contend that understanding mig…
Pressure and praise as an action research methodology
In platform-mediated sectors such as ride-hailing, delivery, care work and cloudwork, gig workers often lack essential employment protections such as minimum wage and social security. Misclassification of workers, opaque algorithms, exploitation of legal loopholes and lobbying by platforms against protective legislation further exacerbates inequalities and discrimination. The Fairwork project at the University of Oxford and WZB Berlin, in collabo…
Unpaid labour and territorial extraction in digital value networks
Production in knowledge and data-intensive industries is powered by work that can, in theory, be done from anywhere, via cloudwork platforms. Cloudwork platforms govern data value chains in distinct ways to concentrate power and extract value at the global scale. We argue that unpaid labour is a systemic mechanism of accumulation in these digital value networks. In this paper we demonstrate how it is tied to platform business models and facilitat…
Derrière le masque
Les plateformes de travail numériques ont souvent été présentées comme une solution au chômage engendré par la pandémie. Cependant, la crise a mis en lumière la vulnérabilité des collaborateurs des plateformes, notamment des travailleurs essentiels parmi eux. Les auteurs examinent le comportement de 191 plate‐formes de 43 pays pendant la pandémie pour savoir si celle‐ci a fait évoluer la branche. Sur la base de critères relatifs à l'équité au tra…
Addressing ethical gaps in 'Technology for Good
This paper identifies and addresses persistent gaps in the consideration of ethical practice in 'technology for good' development contexts. Its main contribution is to model an integrative approach using multiple ethical frameworks to analyse and understand the everyday nature of ethical practice, including in professional practice among 'technology for good' start-ups. The paper identifies inherent paradoxes in the 'technology for good' sector a…
Driving the digital value network
This paper applies insights from global value chains (GVC)/global production networks (GPN) frameworks to explore the economic geographies brought into being by digital labour platforms. In particular, these perspectives facilitate analyses of power imbalances and value extraction across territories-an under-theorized aspect within platform studies. We theorize this dynamic by introducing the descriptor 'digital value network' (DVN): a digitally …
Taming Platform Capitalism
This panel brings together scholars whose work seeks to tame platform capitalism understanding how the lives of platform workers are affected by digital platforms. Research on platform labor has been mostly done in the global north, as well as in relation to global platforms like Uber or Amazon (Rosenblat 2019; Scholz 2016). Thus, the panelists, moreover, explore how the lives of platform workers can be improved within the global platform economy…
Software-Sorted Exclusion of Asylum Seekers in Norway and Finland
As James Scott writes, to be able to govern, administrative bodies need to make objects of government legible. Yet migrant persons do not fall neatly into the categories of administrative agencies. This categorical ambiguity is illustrated in the tendency to exclude asylum seekers from various population registers and to not provide them with ID numbers, which constitute the backbone of many welfare states in Europe. Based on ethnographic fieldwo…
Dis)embeddedness and (de)commodification
The ride-hailing giant Uber has long circumvented labour regulations and commodified its drivers’ labour by existing at the conjuncture of multiple geographies – being simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the places where it operates. In this commentary, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has destabilised Uber’s ‘conjunctural’ existence and forced the company to become more embedded in the locations where it operates, bringing about a – …
Statisticians as Back-office Policy-makers
Street-level bureaucracy literature ascertains that policies get made not only in the offices of legislatures or politicians but through the discretion bureaucrats employ in their day-to-day interactions with citizens in government agencies. The discretion bureaucrats use to grant access to public benefits or impose sanctions adds up to what the public ultimately experience as the government and its policies. This perspective, however, overlooks …
Doing a transversal method
Beck and Sznaider call on 'methodological cosmopolitanism' to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences of conducting a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European national and international statistical institutes. Drawing on debates in science and technology s…
Citizen Data and Trust in Official Statistics
Many, if not most, big data are connected to the lives of citizens: their movements, opinions, and relations. Arguably big data and citizens are inseparable: from smartphones, meters, fridges and cars to internet platforms, the data of digital technologies is the data of citizens. In addition to raising political and ethical issues of privacy, confidentiality and data protection, this calls for rethinking relations to citizens in the production o…
The politics of expertise and ignorance in the field of migration management
This paper shows that the field of migration management features a politics of expertise through which migration is enacted as a reality that can be managed because it can be precisely quantified. For instance, the International Organization for Migration maintains a “Global Migration Flows Interactive App.” This interactive map suggests that the number of people migrating from country A to B can be exactly known at any point in time. This enactm…
Engaging with ethics in Internet of Things
Discussions about ethics of Big Data often focus on the ethics of data processing: collecting, storing, handling, analysing and sharing data. Data-based systems, however, do not come from nowhere. They are designed and brought into being within social spaces - or social milieu. This paper connects philosophical considerations of individual and collective capacity to enact practical reason to the influence of social spaces. Building a deeper engag…
Enacting migration through data practices
Introduction to an edited special issue (SI) based on presentations at a workshop, Peopling ‘Europe’ through Data Practices, organized by the members of the ARITHMUS project as part of the study of how methodological changes in the production of population statistics within the EU affect the enactment of populations as objects of government. The contributions study data practices through which the people of Europe are enumerated, classified, narr…
Enacting migration through data practices
Introduction to an edited special issue (SI) based on presentations at a workshop, Peopling ‘Europe’ through Data Practices, organized by the members of the ARITHMUS project as part of the study of how methodological changes in the production of population statistics within the EU affect the enactment of populations as objects of government. The contributions study data practices through which the people of Europe are enumerated, classified, narr…
The politics of expertise and ignorance in the field of migration management
This paper shows that the field of migration management features a politics of expertise through which migration is enacted as a reality that can be managed because it can be precisely quantified. For instance, the International Organization for Migration maintains a “Global Migration Flows Interactive App.” This interactive map suggests that the number of people migrating from country A to B can be exactly known at any point in time. This enactm…
Dis)embeddedness and (de)commodification
The ride-hailing giant Uber has long circumvented labour regulations and commodified its drivers’ labour by existing at the conjuncture of multiple geographies – being simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the places where it operates. In this commentary, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has destabilised Uber’s ‘conjunctural’ existence and forced the company to become more embedded in the locations where it operates, bringing about a – …
Driving the digital value network
This paper applies insights from global value chains (GVC)/global production networks (GPN) frameworks to explore the economic geographies brought into being by digital labour platforms. In particular, these perspectives facilitate analyses of power imbalances and value extraction across territories-an under-theorized aspect within platform studies. We theorize this dynamic by introducing the descriptor 'digital value network' (DVN): a digitally …
Unpaid labour and territorial extraction in digital value networks
Production in knowledge and data-intensive industries is powered by work that can, in theory, be done from anywhere, via cloudwork platforms. Cloudwork platforms govern data value chains in distinct ways to concentrate power and extract value at the global scale. We argue that unpaid labour is a systemic mechanism of accumulation in these digital value networks. In this paper we demonstrate how it is tied to platform business models and facilitat…
Statisticians as Back-office Policy-makers
Street-level bureaucracy literature ascertains that policies get made not only in the offices of legislatures or politicians but through the discretion bureaucrats employ in their day-to-day interactions with citizens in government agencies. The discretion bureaucrats use to grant access to public benefits or impose sanctions adds up to what the public ultimately experience as the government and its policies. This perspective, however, overlooks …
Engaging with ethics in Internet of Things
Discussions about ethics of Big Data often focus on the ethics of data processing: collecting, storing, handling, analysing and sharing data. Data-based systems, however, do not come from nowhere. They are designed and brought into being within social spaces - or social milieu. This paper connects philosophical considerations of individual and collective capacity to enact practical reason to the influence of social spaces. Building a deeper engag…
Addressing ethical gaps in 'Technology for Good
This paper identifies and addresses persistent gaps in the consideration of ethical practice in 'technology for good' development contexts. Its main contribution is to model an integrative approach using multiple ethical frameworks to analyse and understand the everyday nature of ethical practice, including in professional practice among 'technology for good' start-ups. The paper identifies inherent paradoxes in the 'technology for good' sector a…
Doing a transversal method
Beck and Sznaider call on 'methodological cosmopolitanism' to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences of conducting a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European national and international statistical institutes. Drawing on debates in science and technology s…
Citizen Data and Trust in Official Statistics
Many, if not most, big data are connected to the lives of citizens: their movements, opinions, and relations. Arguably big data and citizens are inseparable: from smartphones, meters, fridges and cars to internet platforms, the data of digital technologies is the data of citizens. In addition to raising political and ethical issues of privacy, confidentiality and data protection, this calls for rethinking relations to citizens in the production o…
The politics of expertise and ignorance in the field of migration management
This paper shows that the field of migration management features a politics of expertise through which migration is enacted as a reality that can be managed because it can be precisely quantified. For instance, the International Organization for Migration maintains a “Global Migration Flows Interactive App.” This interactive map suggests that the number of people migrating from country A to B can be exactly known at any point in time. This enactm…
Engaging with ethics in Internet of Things
Discussions about ethics of Big Data often focus on the ethics of data processing: collecting, storing, handling, analysing and sharing data. Data-based systems, however, do not come from nowhere. They are designed and brought into being within social spaces - or social milieu. This paper connects philosophical considerations of individual and collective capacity to enact practical reason to the influence of social spaces. Building a deeper engag…
Enacting migration through data practices
Introduction to an edited special issue (SI) based on presentations at a workshop, Peopling ‘Europe’ through Data Practices, organized by the members of the ARITHMUS project as part of the study of how methodological changes in the production of population statistics within the EU affect the enactment of populations as objects of government. The contributions study data practices through which the people of Europe are enumerated, classified, narr…
Taming Platform Capitalism
This panel brings together scholars whose work seeks to tame platform capitalism understanding how the lives of platform workers are affected by digital platforms. Research on platform labor has been mostly done in the global north, as well as in relation to global platforms like Uber or Amazon (Rosenblat 2019; Scholz 2016). Thus, the panelists, moreover, explore how the lives of platform workers can be improved within the global platform economy…
Software-Sorted Exclusion of Asylum Seekers in Norway and Finland
As James Scott writes, to be able to govern, administrative bodies need to make objects of government legible. Yet migrant persons do not fall neatly into the categories of administrative agencies. This categorical ambiguity is illustrated in the tendency to exclude asylum seekers from various population registers and to not provide them with ID numbers, which constitute the backbone of many welfare states in Europe. Based on ethnographic fieldwo…
Dis)embeddedness and (de)commodification
The ride-hailing giant Uber has long circumvented labour regulations and commodified its drivers’ labour by existing at the conjuncture of multiple geographies – being simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the places where it operates. In this commentary, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has destabilised Uber’s ‘conjunctural’ existence and forced the company to become more embedded in the locations where it operates, bringing about a – …
Statisticians as Back-office Policy-makers
Street-level bureaucracy literature ascertains that policies get made not only in the offices of legislatures or politicians but through the discretion bureaucrats employ in their day-to-day interactions with citizens in government agencies. The discretion bureaucrats use to grant access to public benefits or impose sanctions adds up to what the public ultimately experience as the government and its policies. This perspective, however, overlooks …
Doing a transversal method
Beck and Sznaider call on 'methodological cosmopolitanism' to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences of conducting a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European national and international statistical institutes. Drawing on debates in science and technology s…
Derrière le masque
Les plateformes de travail numériques ont souvent été présentées comme une solution au chômage engendré par la pandémie. Cependant, la crise a mis en lumière la vulnérabilité des collaborateurs des plateformes, notamment des travailleurs essentiels parmi eux. Les auteurs examinent le comportement de 191 plate‐formes de 43 pays pendant la pandémie pour savoir si celle‐ci a fait évoluer la branche. Sur la base de critères relatifs à l'équité au tra…
Addressing ethical gaps in 'Technology for Good
This paper identifies and addresses persistent gaps in the consideration of ethical practice in 'technology for good' development contexts. Its main contribution is to model an integrative approach using multiple ethical frameworks to analyse and understand the everyday nature of ethical practice, including in professional practice among 'technology for good' start-ups. The paper identifies inherent paradoxes in the 'technology for good' sector a…
Driving the digital value network
This paper applies insights from global value chains (GVC)/global production networks (GPN) frameworks to explore the economic geographies brought into being by digital labour platforms. In particular, these perspectives facilitate analyses of power imbalances and value extraction across territories-an under-theorized aspect within platform studies. We theorize this dynamic by introducing the descriptor 'digital value network' (DVN): a digitally …
Unpaid labour and territorial extraction in digital value networks
Production in knowledge and data-intensive industries is powered by work that can, in theory, be done from anywhere, via cloudwork platforms. Cloudwork platforms govern data value chains in distinct ways to concentrate power and extract value at the global scale. We argue that unpaid labour is a systemic mechanism of accumulation in these digital value networks. In this paper we demonstrate how it is tied to platform business models and facilitat…
Between acceptance and resistance
Digital labour platforms are transforming labour markets worldwide, and migrant workers are pivotal in this transformation. Drawing on a qualitative study in Chile, we uncover how Latin American and Caribbean migrants navigate and resist platform labour conditions, considering the algorithmically controlled and surveilled aspects of food delivery platforms, as well as the impact of migration status on their work. We contend that understanding mig…
Pressure and praise as an action research methodology
In platform-mediated sectors such as ride-hailing, delivery, care work and cloudwork, gig workers often lack essential employment protections such as minimum wage and social security. Misclassification of workers, opaque algorithms, exploitation of legal loopholes and lobbying by platforms against protective legislation further exacerbates inequalities and discrimination. The Fairwork project at the University of Oxford and WZB Berlin, in collabo…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (7 works) · Economics (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (4 works) · Engineering (4 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (4 works) · Politics (4 works)