Faculty Research Fellow
David B. Nieborg (Ph.D. Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, 2011) is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto. David published on the game industry, app and platform economics, and game journalism in academic outlets such as New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and Media, Culture and Society. He held visiting and fellowship appointments with MIT, the Queensland University of Technology, the University of Amsterdam, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the co-author of Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021) and Mainstreaming and Game Journalism (MIT Press, 2023).
Fellowship Research Project—The Political Economy of Canadian Creator Labour
This project investigates the political economy of Canadian creator labour and contributes to ongoing research on the platformization of cultural production. Creators are self-employed cultural producers, who engage in for-profit work independent from incumbent media companies and institutions but are dependent on platforms such TikTok or Twitch to create, distribute, and monetize their content. Existing scholarship on creators focuses predominantly on the everyday reality of work, less on how creators negotiate their institutional relationships with platforms. To gain a better insight into the Canadian creator economy this project unpacks the shifting dependencies in platform markets by exploring data-driven methods for institutional analysis.