15.10.2025
Vortrag von Jaylexia Clark, PhD (UNC-Chapel Hill)
The Power of Racialized Emotions: Racial Profiling and Surveillance within the Platform Economy
On October 29, 2025, the IZEW is happy to welcome Jaylexia Clark, PhD to the University Tübingen.
She will give a talk on the topic of "The Power of Racialized Emotions: Racial Profiling and Surveillance within the Platform Economy".
Talk overview:
This talk reexamines the role that historical processes of racial inequality and domination play in shaping interpersonal interactions and digital infrastructures within the platform economy: On April 1, 2022, a white female Uber passenger, Jill Berquist, was arrested in Minneapolis and later charged for one count of misdemeanor disorderly conduct after assaulting a Black male Uber driver, Wesley Gakuo. A recording of the incident went viral after it was uploaded on YouTube. In the video, Gakuo’s passengers called him a series of racial slurs, kicked his car, and called 911 to falsely claim that she was the one assaulted. What this incident, and others like it, remind us of is the persistent role structural racism plays in shaping interactions and digital infrastructures within the platform economy. Conflict stemming from racialized and gendered understandings of power, status, and privilege are not new social phenomena in the United States. Yet, platform work, such as ridesharing, is thought of as free of racial discrimination due to applications’ use of algorithmic management to assign tasks and allocate earnings.
About the guest speaker:
Jaylexia Clark is a Policy Post Doctoral Fellow for the Center for Information Technology and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill). She previously graduated from the University of Notre Dame where she obtained her Ph.D. in sociology, with a minor in Quantitative Social Science. Her dissertation "Racing Towards Global Racial Capitalism: Investigating the Relationship Between Racial/Gender Inequality and Platform Technology at Work" examines the intersection between platform technology and racial capitalism. Wherein, she investigates whether the use of platform technology for income-earning activities creates new opportunities for labor participation or exacerbates the exploitation of women and racially marginalized workers.
Collaborations:
This talk is part of the ongoing collaboration between the University of Tübingen and UNC-Chapel Hill and follows the joint event “Towards a Transatlantic Roadmap for AI Regulation” in March 2025, with the aim of deepening relations and creating opportunities for further cooperation between the two universities.
This event is co-hosted with the intiative: BiPoC+Feminismen*
Date & time
October, 29th 2025
18- 20 Uhr
Location
Universität Tübingen
Verfügungsgebäude (0.02 VG)
Wilhemstraße 19
72076 Tübingen