Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series

OxDEG: : “Sensing” Productivity at Home: Self-Tracking Technologies, Gender, and Labor in Turkey

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This presentation will explore how women in Turkey use self-tracking technologies to draw new boundaries between home and work and to develop new approaches to housework, labor, and productivity under neoliberal, digital capitalism. It does so by focusing on a group of lower- and middle-class women, who make money through Instagram while also continuing their unpaid homemaking practices as mothers and wives. Although neoliberal, digital economy makes it harder to distinguish home and work, my digital ethnography and in-depth interviews highlight that women working from home feel a home-work separation that renders their labor and productivity invisible. Women’s use smartwatch data, such as step count and calorie scores, to challenge such invisibility by showing that one can be productive at home and domestic work is as arduous as paid labor. By exploring “personal digital data” instead of big data, this paper highlights both when sensors, such as smartwatches, reproduce capitalist logics and become tools to render visible their exploitative consequences.

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Meeting ID: 959 9727 7504
Passcode: 927697