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Sociology Annual Lecture

The annual lecture is a key event for the Department of Sociology. This yearly address offers faculty, staff and students a unique opportunity to meet prominent leaders in the field.

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Pre-Determined Purchasing Power: Governing Algorithmic Price and Wage Discrimination

Speaker: Professor Veena Dubal

Date: Thursday, Sept. 24
Time: 4 – 6 p.m. 
Location: Kaneff Tower, Room 519

A graphic of scales on a motherboard

How are algorithms reshaping what we earn—and what we pay? In this thought-provoking talk, Professor Veena Dubal explores how data-driven systems increasingly determine wages and prices before market interactions even begin, reshaping economic life in the process. Drawing on examples, she examines how workers and consumers are governed by the same underlying data infrastructures—narrowing opportunities for negotiation and embedding inequality into everyday exchanges. Bringing together insights from law, sociology and political economy, this talk challenges us to rethink purchasing power and calls attention to gaps in current regulatory frameworks.

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Professor Veena Dubal is a leading scholar of law, technology and labour whose research explores inequality and the experiences of precarious workers, particularly how digital technologies and regulation reshape work and collective action. A Professor of Law at UC Irvine with a courtesy appointment in Anthropology, her widely cited scholarship has influenced courts and policymakers internationally. Dubal, a former public interest attorney and current General Counsel of the American Association of University Professors, holds degrees from Stanford and UC Berkeley and is the author of a forthcoming book on taxi and ride-hail workers based on a decade of ethnographic research.

Photo of Veena Dubal

We would like to acknowledge the Resource Centre for Public Sociology’s financial support of the Annual Sociology Lecture. We appreciate that they contributed a substantial part of their budget to support the lecture.

Past Events

In his late writings, Marx ventured beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts, turning his attention to colonialism, agrarian Russia and India, Indigenous societies and gender. Guest Lecturer and author, Kevin B. Anderson, joined us to discuss the findings from his new book, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads, which analyzes the late writings of Marx covering topics such as Indigenous communism, gender and anti-colonialism as well as a broader perspective on a global, multilinear theory of modern society and its revolutionary possibilities.

Kevin B. Anderson is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara, with courtesy appointments in Feminist Studies and Political Science. He is the author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism; Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (with Janet Afary); Marx at the Margins; and The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads. Among his co-edited volumes are The Rosa Luxemburg Reader and Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism. He is also an editor of the forthcoming English edition of the late Marx’s notebooks on non-Western and precapitalist societies.