The Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster is co-led by Dr. MaryElizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka and Dr. Rafael Grohmann at the University of Toronto. Last week, I chatted with M.E. about her work at CLCF (read the interview here). This week, I’m sitting down with Rafael to hear more about his community-engaged research on digital labor. Rafael is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies) at the University of Toronto, as well as the leader of the DigiLabour initiative and founding editor of the Platforms & Society journal. His research is focused on digital solidarity economies, workers’ organizing, AI & labour – focusing both on data work and cultural industries.

Daphne: ⁠In a nutshell, who are you as a researcher?

Rafael: I am an organizer. From my role as organizer, as articulator, I am the other dimensions of a researcher. So I can be a lot of things, a policy-oriented researcher, a community-oriented researcher… But the main word for me in how I see myself, and I think how people perceive me, is as an organizer. So, I am a researcher in community, in community of researchers, in the community of other people, in other institutions as well, around the world.

More broadly, I have been researching labour and technology for 15 years, especially – but not only – in Latin America. My first research was on freelance journalists – something I consider a precursor (or a gateway) to the platformization of work. Since then, I have researched entrepreneurial journalism, data workers and click farm workers, journalist cooperatives, delivery workers – including workers’ organizing and cooperatives, etc.

Again, in a nutshell, in terms of content, I consider myself a researcher interested in how workers are building collectivities and governing technologies—be it platforms, data, and AI. I’m currently writing a book about this with a focus on Brazil and Argentina. I have been increasingly involved in solidarity economy studies, queer and trans studies, gender studies. And in this Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) I’m both returning to my roots of researching labor in the cultural sector and also a new one—this is the first time my research site has been in North America! And there’s a new project that’s still in the early stages. I can’t say much about it yet, but it’s about gender, AI and intermediaries.

Daphne: What’s the most surprising way AI has changed or challenged creative labour that you’ve encountered in your research?

Rafael: Well, in terms of workers mobilizing and organizing, I was surprised that artists and cultural producers in general in Brazil were the most important worker power during debates on AI regulation in the country. After voice actors in the U.S. announced that they will probably allow generative AI to dub their voices in 12 languages with a fair agreement in their own local context. They will be compensated for it, but this will affect geopolitically voice actors in other countries. So, through some important mobilizations in Brazil, one of these is called Dublagem Viva, and they could push the government and policymakers to pressure for a stronger AI policy, and stronger AI regulation in the country. This is in process and I am skeptical that this will succeed, but this showed me a strong point.

On an everyday basis, not exactly during research for CLCF, but just like experimenting, I was surprised – actually shocked – to learn what Notebook LM by Google can do creating podcasts. And how our conversation around generative AI is really about the deepening of the datafication of labor.

 

Daphne: How do you weigh the role of governance from regulators versus workers in the context of AI?

Rafael: For me, AI governance should be understood in a multisectoral perspective, but that can really listen to all sectors of society, not just the usual suspects, which include think tanks with enormous lobbying power. Many institutions on internet governance and digital rights try to bring together this multisectoral value. But for me, one of the things these institutions fail in terms of this governance is, because society is unequal, you have to weigh the voices differently. I don’t like the term stakeholders because it’s such PR language, I prefer to say that sometimes governance is another word for class struggles. We have a lot of power imbalances. So it’s important to listen to workers as well.

If you think about big institutions that give equal weight to governments, companies, and worker representatives, or or, if they do not openly position themselves in favor of those who are weaker, this reinforces the power imbalances. So it’s important to listen to more workers in their decisions related to AI. And sometimes encapsulated by this notion of civil society, there are a lot of different institutions with different interests. From think tanks funded by Big Tech companies to really grassroots organizations. So it’s important to listen, to bring to the table all these people and institutions together.

But as critical researchers, we should avoid treating these representatives as if they have the same power, because they don’t. Sometimes we forget that we live in a society strongly shaped by class struggles. It’s an old-fashioned word, but these class struggles are updated by these discussions. I am co-leading the Brazil team for the AI Policy Observatory for the World of Work. And this is one of the things we found in the Brazilian case, for instance. We should carefully listen to worker representatives and grassroot social movements. And this will be also the topic of an event we will organize in September, entitled Workers Governing Digital Technologies. More soon!

 

Daphne: ⁠How do you conceive of community-engaged research with CLCF?

Rafael: Well, I feel very connected with my CLCF colleagues and with UTSC’s strategic plan because there are a lot of people doing community-oriented or community-engaged research. Our brilliant colleagues, T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, launched a book called Heavy Processing, which for me is a book also on community-engaged research or how to combine working with communities and doing high-quality research. And how to do impact, both for academia and communities without being extractivist of their knowledge or how to be respectful with the communities we are working with, while we are researching with them.

This means putting together epistemological points of view rooted in anti-capitalist or in anti-colonial struggles in intersectional ways. In a methodological way for me this means putting together the workers’ inquiry tradition and the Latin American tradition of participatory action research. I’ve been working with workers in Latin America since 2019, and one of these projects is the Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP).

In practical terms, this means a lot of different types of inquiry, like workshops, interviews, focus groups, ethnographic approach, sometimes using digital methods… or even designing a campaign together, as we did for Hire a Co-op with the Argentine Federation of Tech Cooperatives (FACCTIC). And different types of outputs: journal articles, videos, comic stories, a lot of media products, and experimenting with media products while translating or mobilizing knowledge to different audiences. Some of them are on the DigiLabour YouTube channel and the DigiLabour website. We also do collective writing and joint production exercises, such as the primer on digital sovereignty published by the Homeless Worker Movement in Brazil. We are preparing for this year a comic story project called Other Tech Worlds Are Possible. More soon!

And so with our role as university, in my case, I really value multilingualism. So most of the material I’m producing with the communities I’m working with are published in English, Portuguese and Spanish. It’s a way to circulate the knowledge for more countries and not be isolated in North America. Community-oriented research is always collective, and also it’s so powerful and it’s an experience.