The Collective Action in Tech (CAiT) Fellowship 2021

Collective Action in Tech (CAiT) is launching a Fellowship with funding from the Jain Family Institute.

Fellows will receive $500-1000 to share a story of collective action in the tech industry, past or present. This can be a protest, strike, display of solidarity, community-building effort or any other kind of collective project that empowers tech workers speaking out on workplace or broader social issues. For this fellowship, the “tech worker” has an expansive definition. We’re interested in stories not just of software engineers and data scientists, but of all workers in the tech sector including content moderators, warehouse workers, gig workers, and contractors. Content will be published on our website and through one of our media partners.

This year’s theme will focus on collective actions in the Global South (South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia). The technology industry is a global one, but labor actions in the U.S. and Europe receive disproportionately more media attention than those in the Global South. We seek to address this inequality by giving talented content creators the resources and channels to tell their stories.

In creating this fellowship, we hope that fellows will learn about the similarities and differences of tech worker struggle in various geographies of the Global South and North and bring these learnings to their own site of struggle.

Why Your Story Matters to Us

The idea behind the Collective Action in Tech Fellowship is to provide resources and channels for talented content creators to share their accounts of collective action in the technology industry. Applicants should either be tech workers themselves or have the trust and good faith of the tech worker community they cover.

Journalists and academics are welcome but an institutional affiliation is NOT necessary to apply. We are interested in accounts that might otherwise go unreported or underreported in the global press. For this year’s fellowship, we have chosen to focus on stories from the Global South. Based on our own experience running the Collective Action in Tech archive, we have found that actions from this part of the world receive significantly less media coverage than those located elsewhere.

Requirements

This year, we are seeking projects that document actions in the Global South (South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia). Actions may be historical or present-day, and we welcome submissions from individuals or groups of up to three people. It’s worth noting, we are interested in the broader story of how the action came together, what strategies were successful, and how workers came to form a community.

At the moment, we can only consider pieces written or translated into English. However, we would be interested in publishing your piece in multiple languages if you are able and willing to provide a translation. Several of our media partners are also willing to publish pieces in multiple languages. We recognize the additional labor required here and stress this is entirely optional.

Benefits

For every fellow accepted into the program, we can offer:

$500-1000 per project based on team size and resources needed for the project
Publication on our website AND with one of our media partners
Membership in a community of fellows and CAiT members and contributors; optional virtual workshops for providing feedback and reviewing pieces

The fellowship will run from March 15th to June 15th, 2021. Fellows will be required to attend a minimum of two Zoom meetings to meet other recipients and to offer a brief description of their work. For those who are interested, there are opportunities to become further involved with our larger project. We are planning to recruit 3-6 fellows for this year’s program.