The Labor Tech Research Network is delighted to announce Ergin Bulut’s A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry as winner of the inaugural LTRN Book Award. The book, published by Cornell University Press analyzes labor in the video game industry from a political economy perspective. The author provides an ethnographic account of the politics of labor and play in a video game company, Desire, where work is racialized, gendered and stratified despite the prevailing imaginary of meritocracy. Bulut adroitly weaves feminist perspectives and critical race theory into study of an environment synonymous with technomasculinity. Through references to the broader economic climate during the research, the book further highlights a rather stark dependence of creative work on corporate financial structures that introduce another layer of precarity in an already complicated industry. Bulut’s work also combines perspectives in media studies, sociology and history of labor, and while it is situated in an American company, the book speaks to how the pleasure of a few privileged workers in companies like Desire is built around the exploitation of others located even as far as the global south. Turkish edition of the book was published by Koç University Press.

The identification of behavioral and contextual factors affecting food waste in the food service industry and the acceptance of technological interventions to reduce this waste through design-oriented research

Is writing the only way to narrate the story of the past? Sephardic Trajectories, edited by Kerem Tınaz and Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, brings together scholars of Sephardic and Ottoman history to discuss the role of family archives and new media in narrating the Ottoman Sephardic past in the US. This edited volume is inspired by the Sephardic Studies Collection at the University of Washington, which has aimed to digitize, preserve, and make available countless family heirlooms, papers, and personal objects that Ottoman Sephardic Jews in Seattle brought with them as they migrated to the United States.

Başak Can has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. She started working as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University in 2014. She is a medical anthropologist with an interest in the intersections of human rights, state violence, gender, politics of care and body. She is currently working on her book manuscript tentatively titled, Forensic Fantasies: Doctors, Documents and the Limits of Truth in Türkiye. Her research has led to several publications in peer-reviewed journals including Medical Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Reproductive Health Matters, New Perspectives on Türkiye, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Media, Culture & Society. She has also published articles in peer-reviewed journals in Turkish such as Toplum ve Bilim, Toplum ve Hekim and Moment Dergi.

Ayşen Üstübici is currently an Assistant Professor at Koç University, Department of Sociology and the Department of Political Science. She is also a member of the executive board of the Migration Research Center at Koç University (MiReKoc). She completed her PhD at Koç University and at the University of Amsterdam in 2015. Her book, ‘The Governance of International Migration: Irregular Migrants' Access to Right to Stay in Türkiye and Morocco’ was published by the University of Amsterdam Press in 2018. Her areas of interest include international migration, irregular migration, externalization, social and public policy, the informal labour market and gender studies. She published articles in Journal of Refugee Studies, Comparative Migration Studies, Geopolitics, New Perspectives on Türkiye, Alternative Politics, New Diversities among others.