From Code Work to Place Work: Digital Nomads, Infrastructural Others, and the Grammar of Proximate Elsewheres

The UCLA Department of Information Studies invites faculty, staff, and students to its Information Studies Colloquia.

Presented, Researched, and Written by Dr. Héctor Beltrán, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City and San Juan, Dr. Héctor Beltrán will examine how U.S. tech workers construct proximate elsewheres, locations close enough for convenience, yet foreign enough to sustain the nomadic calculus. The talk engages anthropology of technology, platform studies, and relational racialization frameworks to ask: who counts as infrastructure, whose knowledge gets indexed, and what refusal looks like from inside a system that wasn’t built to accommodate it.

Zoom Link