Prism of Labour: Unsettling Knowledge, Skill, and Technology in Work Infrastructures

Paper Title

Prism of Labour: Unsettling Knowledge Skill and Technology in Work Infrastructures

Publication Info

• Topic area: Transnational labour and the intersection of knowledge, skill, and technology in agricultural work.
• Keywords: Labour infrastructures, migrant workers, skill classification, sociotechnical systems, tacit knowledge, transnational agriculture, HCI, agtech, critical ethnography, worker resistance.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Migrant farm workers' knowledge and skills are often reclassified and devalued in transnational labour systems, particularly when moving from smallholder farming in Mexico to greenhouse work in Canada. This reclassification is reinforced by surveillance technologies and managerial control, leading to deskilling and exploitation.
• Significance: Understanding these dynamics is crucial to addressing systemic inequities in global food systems and improving the design of technologies and policies that affect migrant workers' lives and labour conditions.
• Motivation and related work: Prior HCI and CSCW research has examined the role of technology in labour, but often overlooks the experiences of farm workers and the transnational circulation of agricultural technologies. This paper builds on critical scholarship to explore how knowledge, skill, and technology intersect in shaping labour infrastructures across borders.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The prism of labour, a conceptual framework that examines the relational interplay between knowledge practices, skill classifications, and sociotechnical systems to analyze and intervene in labour infrastructures.
• Novelty:
  1. Provides novel empirical insights into the experiences of Mexican migrant farm workers in Canada.
  2. Introduces the prism of labour as both an analytic lens and an intervention tool for HCI.
  3. Demonstrates how migration reorganizes expertise, producing hybrid knowledge practices that reshape technology adoption and labour organization.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted a multi-sited critical ethnography following five Mexican men between their farms in Mexico and greenhouses in Canada.
  • Used Polanyi’s tacit/explicit and proximal/distal knowledge distinctions, Iskander’s theory of skill classification, and Bowker and Star’s work on classification systems to analyze workers’ experiences.
  • Developed the prism of labour to trace how knowledge, skill, and technology interact to form and contest labour infrastructures.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • In Mexico, campesinos are recognized as skilled, with knowledge practices that are holistic, ecologically grounded, and shared communally.
  • In Canada, workers are reclassified as ‘unskilled,’ with their knowledge narrowed to repetitive, output-driven tasks monitored by technologies like chequeadoras.
  • Workers develop hybrid knowledge through transnational labour, selectively reintegrating practices learned abroad into their local contexts.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • The prism of labour reveals how labour infrastructures stabilize or are resisted across transnational contexts, offering a nuanced understanding of how knowledge and skill are reconfigured.
  • Highlights workers’ agency in contesting and renegotiating sociotechnical systems, even under restrictive conditions.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Ethnographic data collected through observations, interviews, and artifact analysis in Mexico and Canada.
  • Participants included five Mexican men with experience in both smallholder farming and Canadian greenhouse work.
  • Analysis focused on how knowledge practices, skill classifications, and sociotechnical systems intersect across contexts.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Small sample size and uneven field access due to ethical and logistical constraints.
  • The prism of labour is untested beyond this case, and its applicability to other labour contexts remains to be explored.
  • Future research could expand the framework to other transnational labour systems and investigate its broader transferability.

Summary

This paper introduces the prism of labour to analyze how knowledge practices, skill classifications, and sociotechnical systems interact to shape labour infrastructures in transnational agricultural work. Through a critical ethnography of Mexican migrant workers in Canada, the study reveals how workers’ expertise is devalued and reclassified as ‘unskilled,’ yet hybridized and reclaimed upon returning to Mexico. The prism of labour offers a relational framework for understanding and intervening in these dynamics, supporting worker resistance and fostering equitable design practices in HCI. This approach highlights the importance of recognizing workers’ knowledge and agency in shaping more just labour systems.