Political Economy International School - The Rise of AI and the Changes in Work and Employment

About The Course

This online international seminar series is built upon the joint Lecture Series in Advanced Political Economy (SAPE) by SOAS University of London and The New School for Social Research in New York in 2021-23. With an additional partner The Center for Heterodox Economics (CHE) at the University of Tulsa, this seminar series will connect the academic discussions to the real-world power struggle and workers’ everyday lives.

We will talk about current affairs, trends in production and work, and their implications on trade unions and the working-class movement. Each week, we will invite leading experts on the subject and analyse what’s been going on by identifying key challenges.

Together with the audience, we want to think about how we can fight against the challenges and build a movement toward a more systematic change.

The Rise of AI and the Changes in Work and Employment will be delivered by Craig Gent, Jamie Woodcock and chaired by Chandni Dwarkasing.

Craig is a writer, researcher and journalist, and the author of Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work. He is currently a Fellow in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, and he was previously a Director at Novara Media, where he worked for over ten years. His research is interested in questions of political subjectivity and solidarity, whether resistance to algorithms or innovative uses of digital technology by activists, and actively seeks to contribute to political action.

Jamie is a senior lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London. He is the author of books including Troublemaking (Verso, 2023), Employment (Routledge, 2023), The Fight Against Platform Capitalism (University of Westminster Press, 2021), The Gig Economy (Polity, 2019), Marx at the Arcade (Haymarket, 2019), and Working the Phones (Pluto, 2017). 

His research is available to read online and has been featured widely in the media. It is inspired by workers’ inquiry and focuses on labour, work, the gig economy, platforms, resistance, organising, and videogames. He is on the editorial board of Notes from Below and Historical Materialism. 

Chandni is a Lecturer in Economics at SOAS University of London. Her current research regards the intersection between working conditions, consumption patterns, and socio-ecological reproduction. In doing so, she draws on classical theories of production, the metabolic rift theory, and world-ecology. Her ongoing research on this topic aims to empirically investigate the relationship between individual carbon footprints, income, and working conditions.