Rafael Grohmann

Rafael Grohmann is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Critical Platform Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media & Faculty of Information. His research focuses on how workers are learning and failing to govern digital technologies, such as platforms, data, and artificial intelligence (AI), with a focus in Latin America. During the faculty fellowship, Grohmann will conduct the research for his project Failure in Queer and Trans Worker-Owned Platforms. The aim of this project is to analyze how the concept of queer failure can be applied to understand platform cooperatives owned by queer and trans working people. Working with and on these queer and trans-led platform labour cooperatives in São Paulo and Buenos Aires, Grohmann engages platform and digital labour studies via queer and trans methodological innovations in digital research. The project informs his SSHRC-funded project Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP), with a focus in Brazil and Argentina. During the faculty fellowship, Grohmann will also work on his first book project in English, Laboratories of Organizing: Workers Failing and Learning How to Govern Digital Technologies. The notion of queer failure is one of the core concepts of the book, which will provide a notion of failure from a queer and anti-capitalist framework to understand the experimental, out of place, incomplete movements of Latin American workers – especially queer, trans, black and brown people, and women – in their struggles around platform labour as they work to build and govern their own digital technologies.