Jiemin Tina Wei

2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

Abstract: The Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform by Amazon is a crowdsourcing site that aspires to provide anyone on the internet with access to “a global, on-demand, 24x7 workforce,” primarily fulfilling tasks such as content moderation and survey participation. Made available to the public in 2005, this platform was an early leader in what has grown to be a multi-billion dollar online outsourcing industry, identified by overlapping designations of “crowdsourced,” “piecework,” “micro,” and “gig” labor. Joining in this online labor trend in droves, academic researchers—particularly those in the social sciences—have been making heavy use of MTurk for collecting survey data, publishing tens of thousands of studies each year using data crowdsourced from the platform. In this presentation, I examine MTurk through both the history of labor markets and the history of social science research participation. MTurk is significant in its popularity and prominence in market shares and is emblematic of the precarious, extremely-low-waged contemporary “digital sweatshop,” which effectively strips workers of any protections, aside from what they build for themselves through information sharing. As I argue, the methodological innovation in social scientists’ discovery and use of MTurk leads to attendant dilemmas in research design, as both researchers and participants attempt to out-maneuver each other on the site for financial gain, knowledge production, and self-protection. Taken together, the historically-situated work and research conflicts, animated by this technological platform, call into question both the ethics of this wave of MTurk-based academic research and the perennial labor shortage issues among social science research participants.

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: In the 1970s-80s, commercialized reproductive technologies experienced a reputational crisis. After the high-profile 1970 Nelson Senate hearings, 18-30% of U.S. women stopped receiving the Oral Contraceptive Pill (OCP). The intrauterine device (IUD), particularly the Dalkon Shield manufactured by A. H. Robins Company, was announced to the medical community and consuming public as the OCP’s ideal alternative. Displacing the OCP from the market niche of contraceptives-seeking American women, Dalkon Shield became the most popular IUD. Yet, like its predecessor, it experienced its own media crisis. In 1974, information surfaced about Dalkon Shield’s serious side effects, including uterine wall perforation, ectopic pregnancy, and death. Robins filed for bankruptcy in 1985, when the product had been removed from market and 11,000 lawsuits filed. In this presentation, using scientific publications, deposition records, and physicians’ personal papers, I trace the strategies of two physicians: Hugh Davis, co-inventor of Dalkon Shield, who discredited the OCP and marketed his Shield as its logical successor; and Howard Tatum, inventor of the Tatum T IUD, who exposed Dalkon Shield’s harms and unseated it with his own competing product. In unearthing the interpersonal networks underlying this litigious and regulatory drama, I argue that these commercial contraceptives were not natural heirs to one another but rather constructed as such by their influential physician-inventors. I join historians’ debates about the usefulness and perils of using ecological metaphors, such as “niches,” to describe social phenomena. Market desires are not natural phenomena, but rather, malleable to human construction, capable of being molded, captured, redirected, and produced. This succession of commercial products—from OCP to Dalkon Shield to Tatum T—reveals the strategies for mutual leveraging among commercial marketing, consumer safety regulations, and medical expertise in the 1970-80s U.S.

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, scientists, engineers, and doctors attempted to tackle the intractable problem of industrial fatigue through physiology, time and motion, and mind. One such group was the engineers championing the "efficiency craze" in the first and second decades of the twentieth century, who proposed that Scientific Management through time and motion study could tackle the dreaded condition of worker fatigue, an obstacle to efficiency and a marker of “waste” in an otherwise efficiently engineered system. This presentation examines the variant of Scientific Management espoused by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the parents from the famous, semi-autobiographical Cheaper by the Dozen. Trained in psychology, Lillian Gilbreth began writing, as early as 1911, her ideas about how a psychologized Scientific Management could affect a worker-employer rapprochement. Obscured, however, by the drama among Taylorites and by her husband’s renown, she would not emerge (in her colleagues’ eyes) as an independent thinker and researcher for decades. After her husband's death in 1924, she expanded the motion studies begun with her husband as part of their "fatigue elimination" project into domestic work, translating how the pursuit of producing "quality" products could lead the worker and "producer"—in this case, the woman homemaker—to a life of efficiency and satisfaction.