economic geography; cultural studies; commons; code studies; information and communication technologies and the state; gender studies; science and technology studies; race and ethnicity; qualitative methods; academic publishing and intellectual property

my dissertation, "Coding Commons: Fun and Work in the Ubuntu Labor Process," analyzes the nature of code as a material and discursive product and its movement in the labor process of a popular free software project, Ubuntu GNU/Linux. my research highlights how making Ubuntu demands an on-going uneasy negotiation between the capitalist mode of production and a non-capitalist mode of production organized by something coders themselves call "fun." i argue that fun is more than intra-psychic individual motivation: it is a means through which labor is organized and thus crucial to the creation of alternative modes of organizing both ourselves and our resources. as firms seek to capitalize on our desire for fun—via processes such as "crowdsourcing" or the creation of "fun" workplaces—knowing what our fun produces is as important as knowing what our work produces.

the intersection of these two modes of production are located in the commons—resources that are collectively owned, or kept outside of ownership, such as the computer code and knowledge that Ubuntu contributors rely upon and create—and i relate this negotiation to theories of digital production, immaterial labor, biopolitical production, and knowledge commons. much of the writing informed by these theories is marked by ignorance of the actual labor process of digital production and by assumptions that see code and coding as immaterial, instantaneous and placeless. my dissertation demonstrates how capital struggles to organize labor and resources without destroying the commons and in doing so develops new means for expropriating value from the commons and passing risk onto workers. the stakes of my research are to understand how this struggle is also productive of new needs and affective relations that may hold the promise for a more just and liberatory future of work.