School of Social and Political Science

Background

Karen Gregory is a digital sociologist and ethnographer. Her work explores the nature and experience of self-employment in the digital economy with a focus on platform labour, risk, and precarity. She is the founder of the MSc in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also the Lead for the Digital/Data Research Theme in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. She is also a co-lead for the Critical Data Studies Research Cluster at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. 

She is co-editor of the book Digital Sociologies (Policy Press 2016), Associate Editor at the Journal of Cultural Economy, and on the Editorial Board at Platforms and Society. 

Before coming to Edinburgh, she was a lecturer at The City College of New York, where she developed and ran The City Lab @ The Center for Worker Education.

Book

Daniels, J., K. Gregory, and T. McMillan-Cottom. 2016. Digital Sociologies. Bristol: Policy Press. https://policypress.co.uk/digital-sociologies

Articles & Reports

Gregory, K. and Gallagher, C. 2024. Mitigating Harms in On-Demand Delivery Platforms. Report Commissioned by BRAID UK for UK Government Department of Media, Culture, and Sport: https://zenodo.org/records/13144353

Pitre, J. & Gregory, K. 2024 (February 6). Dream job: The online creators who make money from livestreaming their sleep [Online].The Sociological Review Magazine. https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.hgwr5143

Gallagher, C., Gregory, K., and Karabaliev, B. 2023. Digital Worker Inquiry: The Critical Potential of Participatory Worker Data Science for On-Demand Platform Workers. New Technology, Work & Employment. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12286

Gregory, K. and Sadowski, J. 2021. Biopolitical platforms: the perverse virtues of digital labour. Journal of Cultural Economy, DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2021.1901766

Gregory, K. 2020. “'My life is more valuable than this': Understanding Risk Among On-Demand Food Couriers in Edinburgh." Work, Employment and Society. Online First: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0950017020969593

Gregory, K. & Maldonado, Miguel Paredes. 2020. "Delivering Edinburgh: uncovering the digital geography of platform labour in the city." Information, Communication & Society. Vol 23 (8): 1187-1202. 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1748087

Gregory, K. 2018. "Pushed and Pulled to the Internet: Self-Employment in the Spiritual Marketplace." American Behavioral Scientist. Vol 62 (2) 208–224. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764218794768

Gregory, K. and Singh, Sava Saheli. 2018. "Anger in Academic Twitter: Sharing, Caring, and Getting Mad Online." Triple C: Communication, Capitalism, and Critique. Vol 16 (1): 176-193. http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/issue/current

Aronowitz, S. & Gregory, K. 2016. "Jobless Higher Ed: Revisited, An Interview with Stanley Aronowitz." Workplace, 28, 130-135.

Gregory, K. & Winn, J. 2016. Marx, Engels and the Critique of Academic Labor. Workplace, 28, 1-8.

Orton-Johnson, K., Prior, N. and Gregory, K. 2015. "Sociological Imagination: Digital Sociology and the Future of the Discipline." Special Section on Digital Sociology. The Sociological Review. https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/blog/sociological-imagination-digital-sociology-and-the-future-of-the-discipline.html‚Äã

Daniels, J., M. K. Gold, with members of the Inq13 Collective (K. Gregory et al.). 2014. “The Inq13 POOC: A Participatory Experiment in Open, Collaborative Teaching and Learning.” Journal of Interactive Pedagogy 5, online ed. (July 15, 2014).

Gregory, K. 2013. “The Teaching of Labor and the Labor of Teaching: Reflections on Publicness and Professionalism.” Journal of Interactive Pedagogy 3, online ed. (November 12, 2013).

Gregory, K. 2013. “Quality Is Our Recipe: Gaming the Lost Affect of Care.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 23(4)

Gregory, K. 2012. “Negotiating Precarity: Tarot as Spiritual Entrepreneurialism.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 40(3/4). 

Gregory, K. 2011. "Tarot."Frequencies: An On-line Journal of the Social Science Research Council. http://frequencies.ssrc.org/2011/11/18/tarot/

Clough, P. and Gregory, K. 2010. “Playing and Praying to the Beat of a Child’s Metronome.” Subjectivity 3(4).

Book chapters

Gregory, K. 2022. "The Students are Already Gig Workers" in Data Justice and the Right to the City. University of Edinburgh Press. Open Access available here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-data-justice-and-the-right-to-the-city.html

Brundage, L., Gregory, K., and Sherwood, E.  2018. "Working Nine to Five: What a Way to Make an Academic Living?" in Bodies of Information: Feminist Debates in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/bodies-of-information

Gregory, K. 2016. “In the Cards: From Hearing ‘Things’ to Human Capital.” In Object Oriented Feminisms, ed. Katherine Behar. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/object-oriented-feminism

Gregory. K. 2016. "Can Tech Schools Go Cooperative?" In Ours to Hack and to Own, ed. Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider. New York: OR Books. http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/ours-to-hack-and-to-own/

Clough, P., K. Gregory, B. Haber, and J. Scannell. 2015. “The Datalogical Turn.” In Nonrepresentational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, ed. Phillip Vannini, 182–206. Oxford: Taylor & Francis.

"The Datalogical Turn" was reprinted and also appears in Clough, P. 2018. The User Unconscious. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-user-unconscious

Reviews

Gregory, K. 2022. Platforms and cultural production, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 28:7, 923-925, DOI: 10.1080/10286632.2022.2137159

Gregory, K. 2018. "Speak on Command: A review of Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce." New Labor Forum. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1095796018765147

Gregory, K. 2017. "Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy." Journal of Cultural Economy. 10(6): 552-555. http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RxrcWY4mJ6PWA3XTvpGv/full

Gregory, K. 2015. "Grounding Discussions of the Digital." Journal of Interactive Pedagogy 6, online ed. (March 5, 2015) https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/grounding-discussions-of-the-digital/‚Äã

Encyclopaedia entries

Gregory, K. 2017. “Digital Labor.” In Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd ed. Ed. George Ritzer. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeos0992

Recorded talks

Gregory, K. 2018. "The Future of Work." Public Services International Congress. Geneva, Switzerland. http://congress.world-psi.org/karen-gregory-talks-about-the-negatives-and-positives-of-computer-platform-capitalism/

Gregory, K. 2017. "The Labor of Digital Scholarship." Talk given at the University of Edinburgh. Audio and Slides available: https://ed.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=41552549-5650-4cdf-bf62-05999534c270

Gregory, K. 2016. "Digital Labour and Exploitation: It's not a Done Deal." Oxford Internet Institute. https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/videos/digital-labour-and-exploitation-its-not-a-done-deal/

Gregory, K., Singh, S.S., and McMillan Cottom, T. 2015. "New Topics in Social Computing: Data and Education": https://soundcloud.com/eyebeamnyc/new-topics-in-social-computing-data-and-education?in=eyebeamnyc/sets/new-topics-in-social-computing

Solicited publications and press

What To Do if Your Boss is an Algorithm, BBC Ideas, April 2019: https://www.bbc.com/ideas/videos/what-to-do-if-your-boss-is-an-algorithm/p0758250

Interviewed for "Love, Life, and Algorithms", BBC Radio Scotland, February 2019 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002b1y

Quoted in "Trade Unions and Academics Seek Ways to Adapt to Modern Economy",  Evening Express, February 2019: https://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/news/trade-unions-and-academics-seek-ways-to-adapt-to-modern-economy/

Interviewed for: "This "Creepy" Time-Tracking Software Is Like Having Your Boss Watch You Every Second." August 7, 2018

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/upwork-freelancers-work-diary-keystrokes-screenshot

Cited in: "How the left must respond to the real automation crisis." The Herald Scotland. July 3, 2018 http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/16328421.How_the_left_must_respond_to_the_real_automation_crisis/

Sadowski, J. and Gregory, K. 2017. "Amazon is running its own hunger games – and all the players will be losers." The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/07/amazon-hunger-games-players-losers-second-headquarters-site-us-techno-capitalist

Gregory, K. and Hendry, K., Watts, J., Young, D. 2017. "Selfwork." Real Life. http://reallifemag.com/selfwork/

Gregory, K. 2016. "Brexit and the Stateless: Digital Citizenship in an Era of Instability." Bella Caledonia. http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2016/08/14/scotland-and-the-stateless-digital-citizenship-in-a-era-of-instability/

Gregory, K. 2015. "Media Matters." The New Inquiry.  http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/media-matters/

Sadowski, J. and Gregory, K. 2015. "Is Uber's Ultimate Goal the Privatization of City Governance?" The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/15/is-ubers-ultimate-goal-the-privatisation-of-city-governance

Gregory, K. 2015. "Good Wives: Algorithmic Architectures as Metabolization" Boundary 2. http://boundary2.org/2015/07/08/good-wives-algorithmic-architectures-as-metabolization/

Gregory, K. 2015. “Weird Solidarities.” Dis Magazine.  http://dismagazine.com/discussion/72958/karen-gregory-weird-solidarities/

Gregory, K. 2015. “Serios Matters: The Thoughtographic Photography of Ted Serios.” http://www.reanimationlibrary.org/pages/wpgregory

Gregory, K. 2014. “The Public Is Political.” New Criticals.  http://www.newcriticals.com/the-public-is-political/print

Gregory, K. 2013. “Magical Surpluses.” The New Inquiry.  http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/magical-surpluses/

Gregory, K. 2012. “Geographies of Intimacy.” The State http://www.thestate.ae/volume-ii-speculative-geographies/

Gregory, K. 2012. “Mediums of Exchange.” The New Inquiry. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/mediums-of-exchange/

For more web-based writing, please see: Digital Labor Working Group, which I co-founded in 2014.

Featured in Ed Reform:
Anya Kamenitz. 2015. “Ten Indispensible Women Transforming Education.”
https://medium.com/education-reform/ten-indispensable-women-transforming-education-97eab21200ee

Interviewed for Buzzfeeed Tech story:
Caroline O’Donovan. 2015. “What if You Could Crowdsource a Loan?”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/what-if-you-could-crowdsource-a-loan#.oxO96nAj3

Quoted in NPR’s 2015 Education Predictions:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/12/26/373268439/15-education-predictions-for-2

Interviewed for New York Times story: Altman, Anna. 2014. “Paying For Quality Education.” http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/paying-for-quality-education/

Interviewed for Washington Post< story: Dewey, Caitlin. 2014. “The Many Problems with SketchFactor, the New Crowdsourcing App That Many Are Calling Racist.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/08/12/the-many-problems-with-sketchfactor-the-new-crime-crowdsourcing-app-that-some-are-calling-racist/

Interviewed for Guernica Magazine story: Reider, Rachel. 2014. “The Teaching Class” http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class/