By Mark Graham and Fabian Ferrari
Understanding the embedded and disembedded, material and immaterial, territorialized and deterritorialized natures of digital work.

Please note that I am on sabbatical for the 2021-2022 academic year. I won’t be accepting or reviewing student applications for the MSc or DPhil programmes during this time.
I am the Professor of Internet Geography at the Oxford Internet Institute, a Faculty Fellow at the Alan Turing 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 Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung and Technische Universität Berlin.
I lead a range of research projects spanning topics between digital labour, the gig economy, internet geographies, and ICTs and development. I am not currently accepting PhD students.
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 22 people. 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 2020, the project has successfully been piloted in Germany, India and South Africa, enjoining major platforms to make changes to their conditions (e.g. implementing minimum wages) in order to receive a higher score. The project will also be launching in the UK, Chile, Indonesia, and Ecuador later in 2020 (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, Geo: Geography and Environment, Television and New Media, Big Data & Society, Global Perspectives, Digital Geography and Society, and Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation.
I teach a course at the OII called ‘Economic Development in Digital Capitalism‘ 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.
I try to maintain a blog to regularly share thoughts and new outputs. If you want to get in touch, you can find my contact details on this page.
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.
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.
This project will examine how the growth of gig work in the United States can contribute to growing inequalities, and develop a framework for understanding best practice for fairer work standards.
The Fairwork project aims to ameliorate working conditions by closely engaging with and supporting platforms to improve their policies. This project aims to implement the established methodology and approach of Fairwork in Ghana.
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.
With Professor Mark Graham
Professor Mark Graham interviewed about gig economy
With Professor Mark Graham
Video interview with Mark Graham, recorded at the ETUC/ETUI conference 'Shaping the new world of work', 27-29 June 2016.
With Professor Mark Graham
The Internet has put information at the centre of the global economy. It is therefore important to understand who produces and reproduces this information, who has access, and who and where is represented in our contemporary knowledge economy.
With Professor Mark Graham
Mark Graham examines 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.
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.
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.
3 February 2022
Professor Mark Graham and Dr Mohammad Amir Anwar, publish their new book, “The Digital Continent: Placing Africa in Planetary Networks of Work”, that examines the job quality implications of digital work for the lives of African workers.
20 January 2022
Professors Mark Graham and Martin Dittus publish their book, Geographies of Digital Exclusion: Data and Inequality, a culmination of 10 years research into data inequalities from around the world.
15 June 2021
Millions of people across the world now work remotely for freelance and microwork platforms, often in low-income countries, that offer outsourcing services to international clients and help power AI systems.
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.
The Intercept, 17 March 2022
From 0 to 10, iFood and 99 get a score of 2, Uber, 1, and Rappi and Uber Eats, zero. Remuneration and working conditions are among the worst in the world.
BBC News, 17 March 2022
A study coordinated by the Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre, conducted in 27 countries, pointed out that Brazilian digital platforms such as Uber, 99, iFood, Rappi and Get Ninjas do not offer standards...
DPhil Student
Margie is a DPhil student at the OII.
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
Fabian's doctoral research examines the political economy of artificial intelligence.
DPhil Student
Marie-Therese Png is a doctoral student at OII and research intern at DeepMind Ethics and Society. Her research focuses are Globally Beneficial AI, Intercultural AI Ethics, and Global Justice.
Alexander von Humboldt Institut Für Internet und Gesellschaft
DPhil Student
Cailean DPhil candidate in Social Data Science whose research interests concern the political economy of open-source software. During his DPhil, he will be studying collaboration networks in machine learning developer communities.
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.
Please note this course is not available in the 2021-22 academic year
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?