PhD Candidate: Sara Milkes Espinosa

Title: Relaboring Surplus: Social Reproduction and Everyday Resistance in Platformed Secondhand Economies

Date: Tuesday, May 5th , 2026
Time: 10:00 AM — 11:00 PM
Location (in-person): TSRB 217A
Parking directions: https://www.tsrb.gatech.edu/sample-page/directions-and-parking/      

Committee: Dr. Carl DiSalvo (Chair), Dr. Richmond Wong, Dr. Noura Howell, Dr. Christopher Le Dantec & Dr. Sarah Fox

Summary: In the context of the environmentally devastating and socially exploitative global fashion industry, online secondhand economies in the United States and other Global North contexts are often celebrated as paths toward sustainable consumption, ethical recirculation, and entrepreneurial opportunity. This dissertation argues that online resale is better understood as a form of platform-mediated labor embedded within imperial surplus economies and colonial racial capitalism. It focuses on the imperial middle, between exploited labor at the point of production and the colonial geographies of discard, where resellers source, classify, aestheticize, and recirculate surplus goods through platforms such as Poshmark, eBay, and Depop.

Drawing on five years of mixed-methods ethnographic engagement, participatory arts-based research, and autohistoria-teoría, I examine how these conditions are lived and negotiated. I develop the concept of platformic torque to theorize how aesthetic, temporal, and regulatory pressures are organized through platform infrastructures and experienced differently across intersectional positions. I then analyze how resellers respond through automation, metric manipulation, rule negotiation, and fragile forms of collectivity.

Bridging critical HCI, feminist political economy, decolonial thought, and discard studies, this dissertation reframes online resale as a diagnostic site for understanding how platforms, surplus, and intersectionally differentiated labor are entangled within imperial formations of labor, consumption, and discard. Rather than romanticizing resistance, it shows how survival, complicity, and contestation coexist in secondhand markets, and how collective futures remain both imaginable and structurally fragile under colonial racial capitalism.