Justine Humphry

Officing: Mediating Time and the Professional Self in the Support of Nomadic Work

Today’s mobile knowledge professionals use a diversity of digital technologies to perform their work. Much of this daily technology consumption involves a variety of activities of articulation, negotiation and repair to support their work as well as their nomadic practices. This article argues that these activities mediate and structure social relations, going beyond the usual attention given to this work as a support requirement of cooperative and mobile work. Drawing on cultural approaches to technology consumption, the article introduces the concept of ‘officing’ and its three main categories of connecting, configuring and synchronizing, to show how these activities shape and are shaped by the relationship that workers have with their time and sense of professional self. This argument is made through research of professionals at a municipal council in Sydney and at a global telecommunications firm with regional headquarters in Melbourne, trialling a smartphone prototype. This research found that while officing fuels a sense of persistent time pressure and collapse of work and life boundaries, it also supports new temporal and spatial senses and opportunities for maintaining professional identities.

Visualising the future of work: myth, media and mobilities

Microsoft’s Future Vision, Googleplex, Apple’s ‘spaceship’ campus: predictions of the imminent demise of the office workplace coincide with a proliferation of media images of the ‘office of the future’. This article argues these visions function as powerful cultural myths for bringing about and stabilising new mobile and flexible work forms and identities. Cultural myths perform a range of ideological and mediating functions. They are a symbolic form for naturalising the cultural production of meaning and a map or charter for the way that society is ordered in the present. While visions of mobile work forms and arrangements promise a revolutionary break from the past, they also mask the re-inscription of a rational economy of time and gendered relations of labour. These visions maintain their currency because they work with contemporary processes of commodification and mediate the very mobilities they help to bring about.

Antiracism apps: framing understandings and approaches to antiracism education and intervention

ABSTRACT Mobile apps for antiracism have become valuable pedagogical and activist tools for their real-time and mapping capabilities, their portability and intimate bodily presence, which enables a reaction exactly when an act of racism occurs. In this article, five mobile apps aimed at producing antiracism education or intervention outcomes from the United Kingdom, Australia and France are the focus of an interrogation of the ways in which racism and antiracism are framed and the strengths and weaknesses of these initiatives for countering dominant forms of everyday racism. We identify a number of different approaches to racism and antiracism in our inquiry, which lead to particular sets of aims, features and uses: the app as a tool for capturing, reporting and responding to racist acts; as a way of reinforcing a wider sense of community identity and solidarity; to demonstrate racism, especially Islamophobia, and make its forms visible, and as a means for challenging racism through raising awareness and encouraging bystanders to oppose it. We argue that while these apps are well disposed to exposing and manifesting isolated incidents of racism in everyday life, we question their potential for transformative societal outcomes beyond the level of unilateral action in the context of events experienced as unique incidents.