Supporting data for "Flickering bodies: Organizing labour amongst disabled data labelling workers in China"

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in China’s data labelling industry between 2018 and 2020, this thesis provides an account of how disabled workers in the sector are being organized to do data labelling in the digital age. It provides detailed insights into the process of labour and organization, illuminating how the bodies of disabled workers are affected and constituted in the process. A post-phenomenological approach is adopted as a theoretical framework to identify three stages for understanding the dynamic process whereby disabled workers are organized to conduct data labelling labour: disembodiment, re-embodiment, and re-disembodiment. Considering these stages together, this research argues that the “disabled body” presents itself in different ways—sometimes present, while sometimes absent—at different moments. This allows for thinking through why large amounts of disabled workers in China appear to be invisible under the new networked society, where work organization has been transformed due to the prevalence of online work. Disclosing this process also allows us to see how technology colludes with capital to impose double marginalization on disabled workers, thus, this study calls for challenging the able-bodied norm and bringing the physical body back to cyberspace to avoid further marginalization of marginalized groups.Building on existing theoretical perspectives regarding the embodied nature of human labour, this research identifies three influential notions addressing “labour and the body”: the reified body, docile body and cyborg body. Understanding the limitations of these existing theoretical perspectives lays the appropriate groundwork for this thesis to propose the alternative concept of the “flickering body”, which builds on the work of Katherine Hayles, as a way of combining both the embodied and disembodied dimensions of the labouring body. This concept has the potential to not only describe the phenomena of the body in online labour in China’s data labelling industry, but also to drive forward our understanding of the dynamic nature of the relationship between labour and the body more generally, thereby making a broader contribution to labour studies and the sociology of the body.

基于2018年至2020年间在中国数据标注行业进行的民族志田野调查和访谈，本论文详细阐述了残疾工人在数字时代被组织进行数据标注的过程。论文深入剖析了劳动与组织的过程，揭示了残疾工人的身体在其中的影响与构成。本研究采纳后现象学方法作为理论框架，以识别理解残疾工人被组织进行数据标注劳动的动态过程的三个阶段：去身体化、再身体化和重去身体化。综合考虑这三个阶段，研究认为‘残疾身体’在不同的时刻以不同的形式呈现——时而显现，时而隐匿。这促使我们思考为何在中国的新网络社会中，大量残疾工人似乎变得无足轻重，因为工作组织因在线工作的普遍性而发生了转变。揭示这一过程亦使我们得以洞悉技术如何与资本合谋，对残疾工人实施双重边缘化，因此，本研究呼吁挑战健全人规范，将身体回归网络空间，以避免对边缘化群体造成进一步的边缘化。在现有关于劳动身体化本质的理论视角基础上，本研究识别出三个影响‘劳动与身体’的关键概念：物化身体、驯服身体和赛博格身体。理解这些现有理论视角的局限性，为本研究提出‘闪烁身体’这一替代概念奠定适当的基础，该概念借鉴了凯瑟琳·海勒斯的著作，旨在结合劳动身体的具身和去具身维度。这一概念不仅能够描述中国数据标注行业在线劳动中身体的现象，还能推动我们对劳动与身体之间动态关系的理解，从而对劳动研究和身体社会学做出更广泛的贡献。