USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Biographical Sketch

Jacob J. Peters is a doctoral candidate in the department of Geography. He received a B.A. with honors from the University of Minnesota’s Individually Designed Interdepartmental Major Program called “Theories of Space, Gender and Politics.” In 2009 he received a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant to complete research on his dissertation, entitled “Coding Commons: Fun and Work in the Ubuntu Labor Process.” The dissertation is a labor geography that analyzes Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and the labor process of one popular FLOSS project, Ubuntu, in order to understand emerging conditions and possibilities of work and to build theory for understanding how our social, economic and cultural lives are mediated by computer code. Jacob is happy to be working with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (co-chair, ASE), Carolyn Cartier (co-chair, Geography / China Studies, University of Technology Sydney), Greg Hise (History, UNLV), François Bar (Communications), and Paul Adler (Management and Organization).