I am the Professor of Internet Geography at the Oxford Internet Institute, a Senior Research Fellow at Green Templeton College, a Research Affiliate in the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment, a Research Associate at the Centre for Information Technology and National Development in Africa at the University of Cape Town, and a Visiting Researcher at the Berlin Social Science Centre.
I lead a range of research projects spanning topics between digital labour, the gig economy, internet geographies, and ICTs and development.
I have led three large-scale multi-country studies (including a five-year ERC Starting Grant), which examine the production networks of digital work. This research analyses how workers in the world’s economic margins are enrolled into global value chains and a planetary labour market (for instance, looking at how Kenyan data entry workers or Filipino personal assistants are an integral part of some of the world’s most important digital production networks). It then seeks to examine how the networked and geographic positionalities of those workers impact on the working conditions that they experience.
Together with colleagues on three continents, I have started a participatory action research project called the Fairwork Foundation. This initiative, which I founded in 2018 and now run together with a group of labour lawyers and labour sociologists, has now grown to an international project team of over 200 people in 39 countries. It has brought together key stakeholders around the world – including workers, trade unions, platforms, and policy makers – to set minimum fair work standards for the gig economy. Using a transparent methodology and a collectively-determined scoring system, we score gig economy work platforms and conduct extensive qualitative research on working conditions prior to releasing the scores. As of 2023, the project has released scorecards in 33 countries. Through our engagement activities we have already influenced dozens platforms to make 160 pro-worker changes to their policies concerning minimum and living wages, fair contracts, anti-discrimination policies, and recognition of worker associations (see https://fair.work/ for more information).
Previous research has focused on digital entrepreneurship and the ways that conditions in African cities shape practices of local entrepreneurs (as part of a large project about African ‘knowledge economies‘), and on how the internet can impact production networks (of tea, tourism, and outsourcing) in East Africa, and asked who wins and loses from those changes. I lead the ‘Digital Inequality Group‘ of researchers at Oxford.
Digital Geographies is my most long-standing research area. I ask how people and places are ever more defined by, and made visible through, not only their traditional physical locations and properties, but also their virtual attributes and digital shadows. If the places that we live in are increasingly digital, then there are important questions about who controls, and has access to, our digitally-augmented and digitally-mediated worlds. I have written extensively about this topic in both the academic and popular press and maintain a collection of maps of internet geographies.
I serve as an editor of the journal Environment and Planning A, and am an editorial board member of Information, Communication & Society; New Technology, Work and Employment; Geo: Geography and Environment; Global Perspectives; Digital Geography and Society; Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation; and the Weizenbaum Journal of Digital Society.
According to Google Scholar, I have a h-index of 57 and there are over 14,000 citations to my work.
I teach a course at the OII called ‘Digital Capitalism and its Inequalities’ that focuses on the winners and losers in the contexts of rapidly changing global connectivity. The course examines how the digital economy can impact on the economic positionalities of people and practices at economic peripheries. I have previously taught courses on: Advanced Qualitative Research, Social Research Methods and the Internet, Globalisation, Introduction to Human Geography, the Collection and Analysis of Geographic Data, Economic Geography, and GIS.
I am grateful to have had much of my research funded by donors such as the European Research Council, the ESRC, the British Academy, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, IDRC, NSF, and the Leverhulme Trust. I am also fortunate to have been able to work with a diverse, creative, and smart group of scholars and activists.
If you want to get in touch, you can find my contact details below.
I come from a working class background, and feel strongly about the roles that an elite university like Oxford can (and should) play in broadly disseminating knowledge beyond its walls, and in attempting to amplify the voices of traditionally marginalised groups. Students and colleagues in similar situations, my door is open.
For more of my writing, please visit my full list of publications.
By Mark Graham and Fabian Ferrari
Understanding the embedded and disembedded, material and immaterial, territorialized and deterritorialized natures of digital work.
This project seeks to apply the principles of AI for Fair Work, by using these as a benchmark for empirical on workers’ experiences of the implementation of AI systems in the workplace.
Drawing on the five OECD principles for responsible stewardship of trustworthy AI, this project proposes developing a set of accountability mechanisms to ensure AI systems foster fairer working conditions.
The Fairwork Foundation will certify online labour platforms, using leverage from workers, consumers, and platforms to improve the welfare and job quality of digital workers.
In the past five years my work has been financially supported by the European Research Council, the Alan Turing Institute, the British Academy, Google, the ESRC, Ox-Ber, the Weizenbaum Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. I have previously served on DFID’s Digital Advisory Panel. I have served in an unpaid advisory capacity to the WEF and the Global Partnership on AI.
By Kelle Howson, Hannah Johnston, Nancy Salem, Robbie Warin, Fabian Ferrari, Yihan Zhu, Pablo Aguera Reneses, Funda Ustek-Spilda, Daniel Arubayi, Srujana Katta, Shelly Steward, Matthew Cole, Adam Badger, and Mark Graham
What sort of working standards do gig economy remote workers face? This Fairwork report scores 17 platforms on the conditions they offer, and highlights the failure to offer basic standards of fairness across much of the cloudwork industry.
11 September 2023
The Oxford Internet Institute is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Dr Amaru Villaneuva Rance in 2022. Amaru was an alumnus of the OII’s MSc Social Science of the Internet programme.
24 August 2022
New Fairwork report highlights best and worst employment conditions across the digital labour platforms.
8 June 2022
New Oxford report reveals best and worst practices in UK gig economy.
17 May 2022
We are pleased to announce the publication of Digital Work in the Planetary Market, a new book analysing the geographies of digital work.
Tagesspiegel, 16 March 2023
In den letzten Wochen hat die Sprach-KI ChatGPT an Popularität gewonnen und gleichzeitig Fragen aufgeworfen: Wie prekär sind die Arbeitsbedingungen derjenigen, die an der Entwicklung von KI-Systemen vor allem im globalen Süden arbeiten?
Personnel Today, 09 June 2022
Only three of the UK’s most well-known digital labour platforms – Getir, Gorillas and Pedal Me – ensure their workers earn the minimum wage, a new study suggests.
g1, 17 March 2022
Study evaluates the situation of app drivers, motorcycle couriers and service providers in five categories. On a scale of zero to 10, the highest score among technology companies was 2.
DPhil Student
Sanna is a DPhil Student at the OII and also a doctoral student at the Alan Turing Institute, where she leads the Data and Inequality interest group together with her supervisor Mark Graham.
DPhil Student
Marie-Therese is a British, Afro-Caribbean and Chinese-Singaporean individual whose DPhil Research lives at the intersections of technology justice, environmental justice and decoloniality.
DPhil Student
Cailean is a DPhil candidate in Social Data Science, whose research interests concern the political economy of open source software and the digital commons at large.
DPhil Student
Srujana is a doctoral student at the OII and a member of the Fairwork Project. Her research focusses on digital labour, migration, and resistance.
Former DPhil Student
Heather Ford is a DPhil alumna who studies how Wikipedians write history as it happens. Her research covers online collaboration, conflict, historiography, alternative media, the Arab Spring and intellectual property rights.
Former Research Assistant
Joe Shaw was an OII DPhil student. His research is concerned with the geography of information, property market technologies (PropTech) and critical urbanism.
Former Postdoctoral Researcher
Nicolas studies digital entrepreneurship and collaborative innovation in challenging environments, such as low-income and post-conflict countries in Africa.
Former DPhil Student
Margie was a DPhil student at the OII.
Former DPhil Student
Fabian's doctoral research examined the political economy of artificial intelligence.
This course will explore what the digital has done, is doing, and will do to capitalism and all of those who live within it. It encourages students to ask questions about digital technologies and power: who do they empower?; who do they disempower?
