Elise Thorburn
Formerly an academic, I am currently a medical student. I was a researcher with Memorial University's On the Move project. With On the Move I investigated the use of algorithmic shift scheduling software in low-wage work environments, particularly those that require long commutes, and how such algorithms impact capacities for social reproduction.
I am also the Principle Investigator on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant-funded project entitled "Between the Office and the Prison Yard: Mobile Monitoring of Social Life" which examines the genealogy and circulation of emerging mobile surveillance devices across a variety of institutional settings. Specifically this research examines the increasing use of monitoring technology in immigration detention, elder-care facilities, and corporate and extractive industries.
Broadly, my research focuses on the intersection of social reproduction and digital technologies in a variety of spheres - including but not limited to labour, care, resistance, education, and imprisonment.
I assert that, in contemporary capitalism, social reproduction travels often through digital channels and in these channels becomes securitised and commodified. But, as part of social reproduction's dual characteristic, the virtualisation of social reproduction through digital networks also opens new possibilities for autonomous socially reproductive processes.
I am also the Principle Investigator on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant-funded project entitled "Between the Office and the Prison Yard: Mobile Monitoring of Social Life" which examines the genealogy and circulation of emerging mobile surveillance devices across a variety of institutional settings. Specifically this research examines the increasing use of monitoring technology in immigration detention, elder-care facilities, and corporate and extractive industries.
Broadly, my research focuses on the intersection of social reproduction and digital technologies in a variety of spheres - including but not limited to labour, care, resistance, education, and imprisonment.
I assert that, in contemporary capitalism, social reproduction travels often through digital channels and in these channels becomes securitised and commodified. But, as part of social reproduction's dual characteristic, the virtualisation of social reproduction through digital networks also opens new possibilities for autonomous socially reproductive processes.
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Published Articles by Elise Thorburn
This paper takes Haraway’s techno-scientific concept of the cyborg as the basis for understanding a feminist theory of class that is rooted in socially reproductive labour. Arguing that the Operaismo notion of class composition ignored reproductive labour as either a technical
or political component of proletarian composition, this article claims that social reproduction in fact provides the foundation for both. Through the notion of the cyborg, this article situates class as a human and machinic con, which is at once conquered by capital’s technological methods of accumulation but also finds its modes of resistance within these same convergences. Using the GynePunk
collective’s DIY reproductive health technologies as an example of class composition through cyborgic social reproduction, this article aims to develop a techno-feminist concept of class suitable to the prevailing technological conditions of our time.
Contact author for full copy.
Featured in Trottier, Daniel and Christian Fuchs. (2014). Social Media, Politics, and the State. New York: Routledge.
Contemporary experiments in organising the “multitude” have proliferated of late – from the encampments of Occupy to the Quebec student strike, the Arab Spring, and the European anti-austerity movements. These experiments, all appearing highly networked, have a political form in common – the assembly. This organising model, the "assembly" as form, now seems to provide a point of convergence for a variety of left tendencies – including both jaded transversal activists who want a bit more vertical organization and vanguardists who have been forced to learn the lessons of horizontality. It is a politics no longer split along traditional lineages, but rather opens us on to a politics of the common – something shared between people, not mediated by the State or capital. Using concepts drawn both from concrete activist experience and from the tradition of autonomism. This paper explores some of the genealogy of the assembly as form, and examines the autonomist notion of the common in order to see the convergences between emergent assembly projects – such as the Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly – and theoretical tools that Autonomist theory has provided in order to being the project of thinking about how we can structure, coordinate, and organise movements so that they get us closer to the creation of a new world
Papers by Elise Thorburn
This paper takes Haraway’s techno-scientific concept of the cyborg as the basis for understanding a feminist theory of class that is rooted in socially reproductive labour. Arguing that the Operaismo notion of class composition ignored reproductive labour as either a technical
or political component of proletarian composition, this article claims that social reproduction in fact provides the foundation for both. Through the notion of the cyborg, this article situates class as a human and machinic con, which is at once conquered by capital’s technological methods of accumulation but also finds its modes of resistance within these same convergences. Using the GynePunk
collective’s DIY reproductive health technologies as an example of class composition through cyborgic social reproduction, this article aims to develop a techno-feminist concept of class suitable to the prevailing technological conditions of our time.
Contact author for full copy.
Featured in Trottier, Daniel and Christian Fuchs. (2014). Social Media, Politics, and the State. New York: Routledge.
Contemporary experiments in organising the “multitude” have proliferated of late – from the encampments of Occupy to the Quebec student strike, the Arab Spring, and the European anti-austerity movements. These experiments, all appearing highly networked, have a political form in common – the assembly. This organising model, the "assembly" as form, now seems to provide a point of convergence for a variety of left tendencies – including both jaded transversal activists who want a bit more vertical organization and vanguardists who have been forced to learn the lessons of horizontality. It is a politics no longer split along traditional lineages, but rather opens us on to a politics of the common – something shared between people, not mediated by the State or capital. Using concepts drawn both from concrete activist experience and from the tradition of autonomism. This paper explores some of the genealogy of the assembly as form, and examines the autonomist notion of the common in order to see the convergences between emergent assembly projects – such as the Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly – and theoretical tools that Autonomist theory has provided in order to being the project of thinking about how we can structure, coordinate, and organise movements so that they get us closer to the creation of a new world