About

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, a Visiting Researcher at the Berlin Social Science Centre, and a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE) at The New School.

My research examines how digital technologies intersect with geographic contexts, transforming work, value chains, and inequalities on a global scale. I ask who ultimately benefits—and who is excluded—when the places in which we live and work become more deeply integrated with digital systems. I focus particularly on data workers at the economic periphery and the working conditions they face. I also lead the Fairwork action research initiative, which evaluates companies and encourages adherence to fair labour standards.

I have contributed extensively to policy development for organizations and governments worldwide, serving as an appointed expert for the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, a Task Force Coordinator for the 2024 G20’s Task Force on “New Digital Technologies for SDGs and Decent Work,” and a member of the UK’s DFID Digital Advisory Panel (2014–2016). My research has informed the World Bank and UNCTAD’s major reports, and I have presented to various high level advisory committees—including the FCDO’s Technology and Geopolitics Roundtable, the G20 Working Group on Development, and the International Telecommunications Union. Through these engagements, I have helped shape digital development strategies and labour policies across Europe, Africa, and beyond.

My most recent book, Feeding the Machine, rips away AI’s veneer to reveal the global production networks that sustain it—a hidden labour force of millions enduring appalling conditions so these technologies can exist. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of fieldwork over more than a decade, it presents a look at the organizations that exploit human labour and collective intelligence to fuel AI’s relentless appetite for data. The book challenges the power structures that keep these workers invisible, showing how AI operates like an extraction machine—churning through ever-larger datasets while concealing the people whose backs it is built upon. Feeding the Machine a call to arms against this exploitative system and details what we need to do, individually and collectively, to fight for a more just digital future. It has been translated into Chinese, German, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.

ABOUT MY RESEARCH

Together with colleagues on three continents, I launched Fairwork, a participatory action research project initiated in 2018. Fairwork has expanded into a global team of over 200 members across 39 countries and has engaged workers, trade unions, platforms, and policymakers in establishing minimum fair work standards in the digital economy. By applying a transparent methodology and a collectively agreed scoring system, we rate companies and conduct in-depth research on working conditions before announcing the results. As Director of the Fairwork project, I have been responsible for studying and rating 712 digital labour platforms, which have – to date, in response to our engagement with them – made over 300 pro-worker changes to company policies (e.g. paying a living wage, providing sickness insurance, and implementing anti-discrimination policies). These are changes that have positively impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers. Our work has resulted in high-level policy consultations in Chile, the UK, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Egypt, Kenya, Indonesia, India and Pakistan. My research has also appeared in hundreds of media outlets around the world (e.g. The Economist, The New York Times, The Telegraph, Die Zeit, Wired, Washington Post, CNN, ITV) (at last count, there were over 1600 instances of media coverage of my work, internationally).

Digital Geographies is my longest-running research area. Algorithms and forms of artificial intelligence, shape ever more of where we go, who we know, and how we know. They are trained on immense datasets—often everything available on the internet. They learn by looking into the past. And within that past are contours, biases, and geographies of historical and contemporary information that will continue to shape even the most frontier technologies and our digitally mediated lives for many years to come. My research in this realm therefore investigates the geographic inequalities woven into our digital environments, culminating in my book, Geographies of Digital Exclusion: Data and Inequality.

I serve as an editor for Environment and Planning A and sit on the editorial boards 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. My work has garnered more than 20,000 citations and I hold an h-index of 66.

More information about my research is available on my website: www.markgraham.space

AWARDS

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, the Ford Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Positions at the OII

• Professor of Internet Geography, July 2016 -
• Associate Professor, May 2014 - June 2016
• Senior Research Fellow, August 2013 - June 2016
• Director of Research, October 2012 - December 2013
• Research Fellow, October 2009 - July 2013