Events
INFO Tenure Talk: “Access or Survival?: Organizational Change in Information Institutions Under Attack”
Event Start Date: Tuesday, February 18, 2025 - 4:00 pm
Event End Date: Tuesday, February 18, 2025 - 6:00 pm
Location: INFO Commons (HBK 0300)
INFO faculty, postdocs, and Ph.D. students—join us for the next INFO Tenure Talk, where you can learn more about the work that has granted the speaker tenure at the INFO College. (Registration required.)
Description:
In 2025, information institutions like schools, libraries, and archives are under attack. But it is the ferocity of the assault that is novel, not the threat itself. We frogs have noticed that the water is boiling, and are worried it’s too late. But despite the loud death threats and quiet austerity, we remain central to the civic and economic life of the 21st century. How does this constant pressure change our jobs, and how might our institutions lean into their power and fight back? In this talk, Daniel Greene will reassess the phenomenon of “bootstrapping,” the organizational changes that led threatened information institutions to embrace technical solutions to poverty, described in his award-winning 2021 book The Promise of Access. He will review what has changed within and without information institutions as the injunction to “learn to code” in a slack labor market transitioned into a craze for generative AI in a tight one. There is no tidy political prescription, but by reviewing how we’ve gotten here and providing a framework to understand changes in our own jobs, we will be better equipped to fight back and move forward—together.
Bio:
Daniel Greene is an Associate Professor in the College of Information at the University of Maryland and Vice President of United Academics of Maryland UMD, the union for all faculty. His ethnographic, historical, and theoretical research explores how the future of work is built and who is included in that future. His first book, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, was published by MIT Press in 2021. It received the McGannon Prize for the best book of the year on media and activism. Greene’s articles appear in such journals as New Media & Society, Social Studies of Science, and Research in the Sociology of Work. He was also an honorable mention for the 2024 David Edge Prize for outstanding peer-reviewed article in science and technology studies.
Additional Information:
Please contact infoevents@umd.edu at least one week prior to the event to request disability accommodations. In all situations, a good faith effort (up until the time of the event) will be made to provide accommodations.
Speaker(s): Daniel Greene