Omar Manky
Omar Manky, smiling, wearing glasses and a white T-shirt, on a beach covered in fog. Lima, winter 2024.
Lima, winter 2024

Omar Manky

I am a sociologist and I study work. I am interested in understanding what people and organizations do when the rules, the places or the technologies they work with change.

I have followed that question among mining unions in Peru, in the 2020 farmworkers' strike, in universities and in the cars of app drivers in Lima. I now follow it into offices where artificial intelligence is beginning to change the way people work. I teach at the Universidad del Pacífico.

These days

  • Project in progress

    El primer escalón

    Many professionals learned their trade in their first jobs, doing simple tasks alongside someone with more experience. I am researching what happens to that learning when artificial intelligence begins to do some of the tasks through which people used to learn on the job.

    Technology and work

  • Article under review

    Comparando plataformas

    In Lima, many drivers and delivery workers work with several apps open at once. I study how they use competition between platforms to gain some room for maneuver within systems that also control them.

    Technology and work

  • Project in progress

    ¿Más allá del sindicato?

    With Valentina Linares, I study how strikes and labor protests in Peru have changed since the 1990s. Who carries them out, where they happen, which organizations sustain them, and why a mobilization can grow without leaving behind institutions that last.

    Work, organization and conflict

  • Project in progress

    China en el aula

    Peruvian universities and degree programs are adopting artificial intelligence tools. I study how that happens and how companies and technological infrastructures from competing countries, such as the United States and China, enter the process.

    Universities and knowledge

From the notebook

  • Pepino de mar

    On how awkward it feels to write in public.

On a wooden table, a beige notebook with a red bird drawn on it, a pencil and a book.

The whole notebook

Topics

  1. 01 Work, organization and conflict Where those with few resources to organize find their strength, and why their mobilizations do not always leave behind organizations that last.
  2. 02 Mining, agro-exports and territory How the places where people live, work and move around change what workers can do together.
  3. 03 Technology and work Platforms, automation and artificial intelligence, seen from a country where most people work in the informal economy.
  4. 04 Universities and knowledge Who decides how a university works, and under what rules knowledge is produced from the periphery.