Motherhood, Labor

and Technology

This research cluster studies the connections between reproductive work, productive work, and emerging technologies. We advance key arguments that point to the ways technological systems increasingly reorganize care, while reproducing existing inequalities and reshaping the conditions under which care is provided and valued.

Emerging technologies have always played a key role in mediating relationships between home and workplaces, transforming expectations around caregiving, productivity, and responsibility, and contributing to further marginalize mothers who live and thrive in precarious conditions.

Our projects have analyzed domestic technologies such as breast pumps, smart screens, motherhood apps, and other digital tools, and demonstrate how these technologies promote ideals of efficiency, optimization, and self-management, reinforcing expectations that mothers excel simultaneously in reproductive and productive labor.

We also explore the platformization of care work through gig economy services and digital marketplaces, which promote entrepreneurship as a solution to the care crisis. These developments are situated within longer histories of welfare retrenchment and labor market restructuring, where care continues to be feminized, racialized, and undervalued.

Maternal Health is central to our work in the lab. We believe that we will only advance goals of social and transformative justice when all mothers are able to raise their families in environments that are free from systemic and interpersonal violence. We bring the analysis of emerging technologies at the center of what it means to care and be cared for in our datafied societies.

Motherhood, Labor and Digital Technologies

In this series of collage and scan-art pieces, and in collaboration with Dr. Angélica Martínez, we offer an analysis and a critique of the contemporary entanglement of motherhood and work, especially as digital technologies (re)produce the mandate that mothers need to excel both at home and at work. We study specific technologies and how they enable sites of mothering: Breast pumps, smart screens, and motherhood-related apps.

This work is featured in:

On the "Uberization" of Motherhood

In this series of collages, Dr. Angélica Martínez and I offer a commentary on the “Uberization of motherhood” through case studies of Gig Economy platforms that position mothers as another form of human capital. We study how reproductive labor is commercialized through digital platforms, while the ecosystem perpetuates traditional gender and racial divisions of labor.

This work is featured in:

  • Conference Presentation “Mothers and the Gig Economy” The Museum of Motherhood’s Academic & Arts Conference 2025. See the presentation here.

Mother User → ← Mother Worker

In collaboration with Dr. Angélica Martínez, and Dr. Jennifer Denbow, author of "Reproductive Labor and Innovation", we hosted a panel where we explored the connections between reproductive labor, productive labor, and how the design of digital platforms reinforces historical inequalities in the performance of care work.

This work was presented in:

Gendered Labor in Gig Economy Platforms

This image facilitated a presentation that explored how care-related gig economy platforms reinforce historical gendered and labor relations.

This work was presented in collaboration with Dr. Angelica Martinez in:

  • Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) 2025 as part of the panel "(Un/Re)Making Gendered Platforms".