Alexandra Mateescu is a researcher with Data & Society’s Labor Futures program. As a trained anthropologist, she works on in-depth qualitative research projects and produces and curates accessible resources on timely labor issues. Her most recent publication, Challenging Worker Datafication, considers how workers and labor advocates have approached common workplace data collection practices, and how they have challenged or embraced these practices to strengthen labor movements. Her current project focuses on the hype narratives surrounding the adoption of generative AI technologies and the experiences of fashion industry workers whose images are being incorporated into AI systems.
Broadly, Alexandra is interested in understanding the role of digital surveillance and datafication in low-wage and precarious industries. In the past, she has worked on projects exploring care workers’ experiences navigating digital gig platforms, the unacknowledged human labor behind automation within service industries and agricultural labor, worker data rights and data commodification, the digital infrastructures of US state welfare systems, and the intersections of new technologies and care work.
Her academic publications include journal articles in Surveillance & Society, the Journal of Sociology, and New Media & Society, and her writing has been published or cited in The New York Times, Tech Policy Press, NPR, The Nation, Fast Company, and Slate. Alexandra also served as a guest co-editor (with Dr. Virginia Eubanks) for a special series on “Automating Care” in The Guardian (2021), working with in-house journalists to curate eight articles on racial and gender inequalities in care infrastructures. Since 2018, she has run a biweekly newsletter, Updates in Labor & Tech, through which she shares the latest global news and scholarship on issues at the intersection of labor and technology.
Alexandra earned her master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the University of Chicago.