Scholar Shaka McGlotten and activist Chris Ramsaroop join our host, Natalie Kerby, to discuss data in the context of labor. The episode addresses the historical ways that data has been used to organize labor, the labor of making ourselves visible to data-centric systems, and the different ways that people, and more specifically workers, are resisting datafication.
Episode 2: Data & Labor
Shaka McGlotten & Chris Ramsaroop

Becoming Data
Co-produced with
Public Books
About the Guests
Shaka McGlotten (@shakaz23) is a professor of anthropology and media studies at Purchase College, SUNY and 2020-2021 Faculty Fellow at Data & Society.
Chris Ramsaroop (@j4mw) is an organizer with Justice for Migrant Workers and a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto.
Resources
- Dark Matters: The Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne
- Poetics of Relation by Édouard Glissant
- “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)” by Trevor Paglen, The New Inquiry
- Reality Check 101: Rethinking the impact of automation and surveillance on farm workers by Chris Ramsaroop, Data & Society