Questions of equality and social justice are as important as ever in the information age. Do Internet technologies give rise to radical social change, or do they just reproduce existing social and economic divisions and relationships?
By changing how people and organisations interact with each other, ICTs disrupt and reconfigure social networks, information and value flows, and geographic space: but who exactly profits?
This project seeks to utilise newly available data to help urban policy makers improve transport infrastructure to cope with growing and increasingly mobile populations.
Contemporary urban policy makers face a critical challenge over the next decade or so: transport infrastructures need to be able to cope with growing (and increasingly mobile) populations, yet central and local governments are operating in an era of austerity where major new investment in infrastructure is unlikely.
Data science and data-centric engineering offer a potential solution to this problem. The availability of new data is transforming the way we study human behaviour as well as plan and operate infrastructure. Along with data from sensors, crowd-sourced data, social data, and administrative data have also all greatly increased. Millions of volunteers contribute geographic data to platforms like OpenStreetMap, while huge swaths of social data (e.g., online reviews, posts on social networking sites, etc.) augment our physical space with additional data. Administrative and government processes are digital, available in real-time and more easily linked and searched than ever before.
This project seeks to understand how these additional data sources complement sensor data to give us a deeper understanding of human behaviour and improve modelling and prediction tasks. It also seeks to innovate in ways to visualise and analyse this data quickly, extending previous work on generating tile maps algorithmically.
This research project investigates the working lives and aspirations of ride-hail workers in Hyderabad, in order to understand what worker-defined futures of ride-hail work might look like.
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.
3 November 2022
University of Oxford has joined a new £4 million research network, the Digital Good Network (DGN), to explore how to ensure that digital tech is a for good in society and the economy.
20 October 2022
New research from the University of Oxford shows how remote digital work is exacerbating the global urban-rurual divide.
24 August 2022
New Fairwork report highlights best and worst employment conditions across the digital labour platforms.
SRF, 17 November 2022
In this documentary, Swiss broadcaster SRF speaks to Fairwork researcher Dr Alessio Bertolini about workers' rights and the gig economy.
New Statesman, 04 November 2022
Academics have warned MPs that the use of connected tech in the workplace needs to be better regulated.
The Independent, 09 November 2022
The study found the algorithms – processes used to rank workers according to performance metrics – lack transparency and are highly volatile.
Professor of Internet Geography
Mark Graham is an economic geographer. His research focuses on digital labour, the gig economy, and digital inequalities. He is the author, most recently, of The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction.
Professor Mark Graham is Professor of Internet Geography at the OII, asking 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.
His work covers a diverse range of topics, including digital labour, the gig economy, internet geographies, and ICTs and development. His research has been published in journals including Information, Communication & Society, Sociology, The Journal of Development Studies, and Urban Geography, and he is an editor of Environment and Planning A. Professor Graham has authored and edited books published by Polity, Routledge, and Oxford University Press.
Graham is one of the founders of the participatory action research project called the Fairwork Project, founded in 2018, which has brought together a team of 22 labour sociologists and lawyers. Bringing together stakeholders – including workers, trade unions, platforms, and policy makers – the project aims to set minimum fair work standards for the gig economy and frequently reports on platforms’ working conditions. Other projects he has worked on have studied knowledge economies in Africa, the ‘planetary labour market’, and the inequalities of Wikipedia.
At the OII, he teaches the course ‘Economic Development in Digital Capitalism’, which examines how the digital economy can impact on the economic positionalities of people and practices at economic peripheries.
Departmental Lecturer
Grant Blank's work focuses on the social and cultural implications of the Internet and new media, quantitative and qualitative methods, and cultural sociology. He teaches on the OII social statistics courses.
Professor of Education, the Internet and Society
Rebecca Eynon's research focuses on learning and the Internet, and the links between digital and social exclusion.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Matthew Cole is a Postdoctoral Researcher with Fairwork, investigating global platforms. His research interests include the political economy of technology and platforms, particularly the transformation of work.
