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Enda Brophy

Associate Professor

E: ebrophy@sfu.ca
Room: HC7357

My research examines labour, technology, communication, and collective organization in the digital economy. I’ve explored the relationship between work and digital technology in call centre work, data work, platform-based gig work, outsourcing, and algorithmic management practices from the perspective of worker resistance and labour organizing. My first book, Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce (2017) was awarded the Canadian Communication Association’s Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize and the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies Book Prize. More recent research examines labour organizing by contract workers in tech and in the broader platform economy. This work resulted in the collaborative book project Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry (2025), co-authored with Julie Chen, Alessandro Delfanti, Brian Dolber, Lilly Irani, and Tamara Kneese. Drawing on collaborations with unions across the tech sector—including Alphabet Workers Union, Rideshare Drivers United, Turkopticon, Amazon Workers Solidarity, and Tech Workers Coalition—the book renews workers’ inquiry for an economy where platforms, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are predominant.

Through the Cultural Workers Organize project I’ve collaborated with Nicole Cohen and Greig de Peuter to examine worker-led efforts to collectively transform material conditions in media, cultural and tech industries in a context of labour precarity, industrial flux, and technological change. We’ve explored unionization campaigns, co-operatives, alternative worker organizations, policy advocacy, and the development of new forms of collective infrastructure by cultural and media workers, including interns, freelancers, artists, digital media workers and tech workers through fieldwork in Canada, Italy, the United States, and other countries. We are currently completing a book gathering over a decade of research in this area for Pluto Press.

A third strand of my research explores precarious work, outsourcing, and the neoliberal university. At Simon Fraser University I work with SFU Contract Worker Justice (CWJ), a coalition of students, faculty, workers, and others community members advocating for the SFU administration to do the right thing and bring food and cleaning service in-house. The campaign has been endorsed by every constituency on campus, by Burnaby-area MLAs, by the mayor of Burnaby and the Burnaby Council, and by research institutes, unions and other labour organizations in Metro Vancouver. The campaign includes a research project which supports the goals of the coalition, producing knowledge that brings public attention to the working conditions of SFU’s contract workforce. The CWJ campaign and research project have contributed to living wage gains for contract service workers and access to campus amenities and benefits previously reserved only for SFU employees, including like daycare service and tuition waivers.

I have translated numerous works by Italian scholars, including Gigi Roggero’s The Production of Living Knowledge: Crisis of the University and Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America and Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa’s The Work of Love: Unpaid Housework, Poverty and Sexual Violence at the Dawn of the 21st Century.

Currently Teaching

Courses

Future courses may be subject to change.

publications

Books

Edited Collections

  • Anderson, Benjamin J., Steff Ling, and Enda Brophy (forthcoming). Class, Skill and Exploitation: Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital at 50. Special issue of New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry.
  • Anderson, Benjamin J., Enda Brophy, and Max Haiven, eds. Zero Credit: Countering the Dreams of Techno-Finance. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Issue 45, 2022.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Public Writing

Graduate Supervision

I’ve been fortunate to work with an exceptional group of graduate students over the years. Below is a list of students I have supervised. 

PhD Students

  • Alicia Massie (completed Spring 2026)

Power, and the Politics of Migrant Care Labour in Canada, 2019–2024

  • Ben Anderson (completed Fall 2022)

Craft Capitalism: Labour and the Cultural Narratives of Artisanal Production

Master’s Students

 

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