Timothy Pachirat

Bio

Timothy Pachirat (Ph.D. Yale, 2008) is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College.  His research and teaching interests include comparative politics, the politics of Southeast Asia, spatial and visual politics, the sociology of domination and resistance, the political economy of dirty and dangerous work, and interpretive and ethnographic research methods.  He is the author of chapters in edited volumes on interpretive and ethnographic research methods and his book, *Killing Work: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight* (under contract, Yale University Press), draws on an ethnography of immigrant labor on the kill floor of an industrialized slaughterhouse in the Great Plains of the United States to explore how violence that is seen as both essential and repugnant to modern society is organized, disciplined, regulated, and reproduced.

Abstract

Digital Slaughter

What difference does it make when an internet playground is deployed to rupture the physical walls of an actual factory?  I draw on events preceding and following the Humane Society of the United States' January, 2008 YouTube release of undercover footage filmed at an industrialized slaughterhouse in Chino, California to explore the promises and pitfalls of digital labor that attempts to collapse, subvert, or otherwise short-circuit the spatial and psychological separation between material sites of production and consumption.  I contextualize this exploration through my own ethnographic research on the kill floor of an industrialized slaughterhouse, both juxtaposing and seeking similarities between the visceral materiality of slaughterhouse work and digital labor.