ABSTRACT
The phrase “mechanical Turk” has become a 21st-century metaphor for expendable labor, describing machines that seem to perform automated tasks while these tasks are, in fact, being performed by people who cannot be seen. The Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) service is increasingly becoming used in the service of knowledge production within the academy, providing access to a cheap, anonymous, crowdsourced labor force—the majority of whose workers come from the Global South. Through AMT and other digital labor markets, academic labor is being doled out to an unseen and often uncredited labor force to produce scholarship. It is, Risam argues, a symptom of the progressive absorption of knowledge production into post-fordist neoliberal frameworks that have given rise to a disposable labor model for the academy. AMT is indicative of an increasing willingness of scholars to “outsource” the very labor that is essential to knowledge production, whether to graduate students, undergraduates, or invisible workers in the Global South. Drawing on digital humanities, political science, and artificial intelligence scholarship, Risam proposes that what is at stake in the turkification of academic labor is the ethics of, and scholarly integrity of, the research itself, which risks foreclosing the radical possibilities of the knowledge.
