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- Convenors:
-
Silvia Pitzalis
(Link University)
Luca Rimoldi (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)
Eugenio Giorgianni (University of Messina)
Giuliana Sanò (University of Messina)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
The panel ethnographically explores how digitalisation shapes migrants' lives and work, focusing on racialisation, gendering, exploitation, and resistance. It invites interdisciplinary approaches to study migrant labour and digital platform work.
Long Abstract:
The panel explores the interplay between mobility, work, and digitalisation, emphasising the need for anthropological perspectives in dialogue with other disciplines. While the intersection of migration, work, and digital platforms remains relatively underexplored in academic debates, it is increasingly relevant to contemporary political, economic, and social dynamics. Therefore, this panel aims to investigate how digitalisation affects migrants' everyday lives and working conditions. It will focus, on one hand, on the effects of racialisation and gendering of the workforce, as well as recruitment practices, exploitation, and digital gangmastering; and on the other hand, on workers' agency, resistance tactics, and self-organisation practices.
The panel will address key questions such as:
How do migrants engage with digital platform work and integrate it into their daily routines and life trajectories?
How do digital platforms create symbolic, material, and working boundaries, reinforcing or challenging discrimination and exclusion?
What is the role of digital tools in migrant welfare programmes and integration processes?
How do these tools affect self-organisation, negotiation strategies, and workers’ agency?
The panel invites contributions that combine theoretical and practical approaches, particularly those employing ethnographic and intersectional methods, to examine how digital platforms shape work practices, influence exploitation and gangmastering, affect migration patterns, and impact the personal lives of migrant workers. Additionally, it will explore how these digital platforms either foster or hinder collective action and agency, and how they influence access to welfare and integration, considering the specific vulnerabilities of migrant labour.
Keywords: mobility, work, digitalization, digital platforms, gig economy, borders
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the impact of platformisation on migrant workers in the UK's domestic care and delivery sectors. It explores how digital platforms offer opportunities for those with no or precarious legal status while perpetuating exploitation.
Paper long abstract:
The rapid platformisation of labor markets has significantly transformed the domestic care and delivery sectors, particularly impacting migrant workers with precarious legal status (Doorn and Vijay 2021; Piasna et al. 2022; Kowalik et al. 2023). This paper examines the complex intersection of gig work, irregular migration, and labor within the United Kingdom, focusing on how online platforms have emerged as accessible entry points for vulnerable groups.
Our research reveals a dynamic where platforms simultaneously provide opportunities and perpetuate precarious working conditions for migrants with no insecure legal status. Food delivery platforms like Deliveroo and Uber Eats, while promoting flexibility, rely heavily on an underpaid, racially minoritised, and often undocumented workforce. Similar patterns are observed in the domestic care sector, where emerging platforms offer low-threshold entry points but exacerbate precarity for migrant workers in cleaning and childcare services.
Drawing on collaborative multimodal ethnographic research conducted in Birmingham involving a participatory group of ethnographers, migrant workers, and activists within these sectors, we explore the factors driving migrant participation in platform-based work. These factors include bypassing barriers to direct negotiation, accessing on-demand income, and using gig work as evidence for legal regularisation.
Additionally, we explore how shifting political interests, union struggles, regulatory frameworks, and recent judicial decisions have paradoxically produced 'asymmetrical infra-alliances' between parties with opposing political interests. The paper particularly examines how unions are adapting their strategies to address the increasing deregulation of the platform-based gig economy, which is undermining recently gained rights, such as the abolition of the 'family work exemption'.
Paper short abstract:
This research explores Nigeria's transnational virtual labor migration as a tool for digital diplomacy. It analyses how remote workers enhance the country's global influence. Using surveys and case studies, it examines how virtual migrants shape Nigeria’s global image
Paper long abstract:
This research investigates the concept of digital diasporas, focusing on transnational virtual labour migration as a tool for digital diplomacy in Nigeria. Traditional migration boundaries have expanded in the digital age, enabling Nigerian professionals to engage in global labour markets remotely. The study explores how these transnational virtual labour migrants can serve as digital diplomats, enhancing Nigeria's global presence and influence. The research adopts quantitative and case studies approaches, using a web survey with Nigerian digital workers and selected cases. This will be corroborated by extant literature and online materials. The findings will examine the racialisation, exploitation, and coping mechanisms (resistance) of the virtual workers and how these factors have contributed to the image of Nigeria and promoted mutual understanding between Nigerian virtual workers and their foreign employers. The study will also highlight the role of digital platforms in facilitating these virtual labour migrations and the importance of digital literacy and robust internet infrastructure in enhancing the socio-cultural impacts of virtual labour migration, including shifts in identity, community engagement, and the perception of Nigeria on the global stage. This research offers insights into how digital labour can be leveraged for diplomatic purposes, enhancing Nigeria's soft power and fostering international collaboration. By laying the groundwork for future research on the intersection of digital migration and diplomacy, this study provides a framework for policy development and international relations in the digital era.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the entanglement of skilled digital platform workers from India between their inability to grow locally and capitalist accumulation through international migration in a post-pandemic global economy.
Paper long abstract:
Work and modes of doing work have undergone phenomenal changes in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. The transition in the nature of work has also led stakeholders to realise their dependence and vulnerability in relation to the world economy. Digital platform work bears the benefit of accessibility of work using devices and connectivity despite the lack of traditional office infrastructure. While it is seemingly disconnected from the formal tie-ups of work, yet at the same time digital economy is embedded in transnational dependedness. Considered a highly skilled sector of labour, digital platform work is the closest to capitalist accumulation through labour employees can achieve. For employees working in platforms across the global south, one of the incentives for undertaking platform work was migration to host nations in the global north. However, increased restrictions imposed by nations of the global north in a post-pandemic economy, as well as increased infrastructural cuts in the global south, have led many platform workers to feel entrapped in a cyclical loop, thereby hindering their growth. Using literature based on the Indian platform workers post-pandemic, this article reviews the situation of growth of Indian platform workers and its long-term impact on the economy.
Keywords: Digital Platforms, Indian employees, Migration, Platform work,
Paper short abstract:
This study explores how Romanian seasonal migrants use TikTok to creatively express their digital belonging through content and discourse analysis. It highlights TikTok’s role in shaping identity, resilience, adaptation, and challenging stereotypes while negotiating symbolic boundaries.
Paper long abstract:
This study examines how Romanian seasonal migrants express their belonging and negotiate their identity on TikTok through creative and performative methods. Migrants share their challenges, achievements, and cultural aspects of seasonal work in short videos, which become narratives of resilience and adaptability. TikTok offers them a platform to challenge stereotypes and the stigmatization associated with their precarious status, allowing them to redefine their public image and assert their agency.
By expanding Jay Marlowe's concept of digital belonging, the study explores how migrants utilize strategies like mimicry, viral content creation, and engagement with trending topics to claim space in digital cultures. The role of these strategies in fostering community building, solidarity, and connection among migrant workers across different countries is also highlighted. Furthermore, it considers how TikTok's algorithmic promotion of content influences the visibility of their stories.
The research investigates the specific challenges migrants face in gaining visibility and participating in public discourse on identity and integration, particularly in the context of social and cultural boundaries. Using content and discourse analysis of TikTok videos, this study highlights how migrants reshape public perceptions of their work and identity. Early findings suggest that TikTok empowers migrants to challenge stereotypes, build solidarity within their communities, and foster a sense of belonging through creative self-representation.
Paper short abstract:
Smuggling Crews (youth gang) broadcast their own labour as a critical engagement with border infrastructure. Netnogaphic and ethnographic field work reveals the intersection of state violence and emerging bordered youth culture symbolised in the figure of the smuggler on the frontline.
Paper long abstract:
The ‘war on mobility’ unfolds in the seemingly mundane borderlands of the Balkan route. Orban’s border fence requires meticulous organisation from those on the frontline (racialised youth) ‘working the borders’ in multiple occupations. ‘Working Crews’ produce collective agency in the face of extreme precarity at the borders. Thus communitarian performances broadcasted on social media accounts affords to social status, sense of in-group identity and place-making (territorialisation) from their own labour practices in human smuggling. Several hours of netnogrpahic video material and months of border ethnography and interviews uncovers how ‘working crews’ visually represent ‘working’ borders. This is achieved with the critical lens of seeing smugglers broadcasting "Border Spectacles From Below” (video content via social media platforms) that oppose and reinforce moral panics of migrant youth and criminality. The group broadcasts repertoires of action-oriented aesthetics in three ways: 1). ability/ingenuity to work as a group to smuggle humans in high intensity moments evading border control 2). Displays of resistance when reappropriating border material that are meant to symbolise European power and control 3) the group develop their own identities by transposing references (political, social and cultural histories, militarism and tribal and ethnic identities) from origin over European border materiality. Thus the smuggling ‘working crew’ symbolise expressions of struggle and confrontation to the direct and structural violence faced by racialised men and adolescent boys from past imperial projects and EUrope’s ongoing border regime, raising important questions to the intersection of state violence and expressions of emerging trans-bordered sub-cultures.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the Sudanese migrant community leverages Facebook groups and other social media platforms to acquire knowledge and navigate migration processes. The research is framed within the concept of "communities of practice," (Wenger,1986).
Paper long abstract:
Migration has long been an integral part of Sudanese society, with movement from Sudan historically tied to broader patterns of migration across the Sahel and North Africa. Today, digital technology plays a vital role in facilitating migration, enabling migrants to access real-time information and advice during their journeys. This technological shift has sparked both interest and concern, particularly regarding the use of apps to support irregular migration and help migrants avoid exploitation by smugglers and human traffickers (IOM 2022).
This paper explores how the Sudanese migrant community leverages Facebook groups and other social media platforms to acquire knowledge and navigate migration processes. The research is framed within the concept of "communities of practice," as Wenger (1986) proposed, which refers to people engaging in collective learning within a specific domain.
The study employs qualitative research methods, including online ethnography and contextual analysis, to examine posts from 12 Facebook groups and the content of a YouTube channel. These sources offer valuable insights into how migrants share information about migration routes, costs, smugglers, and challenges they may encounter, particularly in transit countries such as Libya, Tunisia, Niger, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, and along the Balkan route.
Initial findings reveal that Facebook groups have become a critical source of information for prospective migrants. They also serve as a platform where migrants form a shared identity, using specialized terminology related to migration. As Facebook began to restrict content, migrants adapted by using local languages and coded terms to bypass detection algorithms.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how migrants in post-2015 Italy navigate digitalized border practices, exploring the impact of technology on their lives, identity, access to services and processes of integration.
Paper long abstract:
Digital technologies have become ubiquitous gateways and essential tools for accessing key aspects of socio-economic life, a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The management of human mobility is a central area where this transformation is occurring. This paper explores how migrants understand, experience, and navigate these processes in contemporary European settings. Specifically, the study analyzes data collected in multiple sites across Italy in 2023-2024 through interviews with migrants, NGO workers, legal advisors, and other border stakeholders. It focuses on post-2015 Italy, a key migratory route at Europe’s southern border, which has become a site for experimenting with new border practices, particularly after the 2015 refugee crisis. In its complex mix of long-established paper-based procedures and newer data-driven practices, the digitalized bureaucracy of the 21st-century frontier has profound effects on migrants’ lives, their sense of identity and belonging, and processes of integration. Drawing from the fields of STS, data justice, and the biopolitics of biometrics, this paper expands the theoretical understanding of the migration-technology nexus, moving beyond the focus on data protection and surveillance to encompass migrants' embodied experiences of the new, dispersed, and datafied frontier.
Paper short abstract:
This study examines how West African migrant women in Spain adapt traditional tontines using digital platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. It highlights benefits, such as mobile money and remote meetings, but also the loss of vital social bonds that underpin these microfinance practices.
Paper long abstract:
This research explores the role of digital platforms and social media in the adaptation and transposition of traditional West African informal microfinance strategies, specifically tontines, within migratory contexts. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with Senegalese and Gambian migrants in Spain, the study focuses on three key aspects:
1. Enforcement of sanctions against defaulters: Historically, sanctions were embedded within sociocultural norms and customary law systems, often involving direct pressure on the defaulter's family. In migratory settings, however, social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are increasingly utilized to publicly denounce defaulters within migrant communities.
2. Transformation of monetary transactions: Traditionally, members handed over cash in person. However, this practice is being replaced by the use of mobile money services, such as Bizum in Spain, which enable digital transfers and reduce the need for physical cash exchanges.
3. Virtualization of regular meetings: Tontine meetings, which traditionally required the physical presence of members for fund distribution, have been adapted to accommodate members’ work schedules and geographic dispersion. Meetings are now recorded and shared through digital platforms like WhatsApp and Zoom, enabling remote participation.
The primary objective of this paper is to demonstrate how digital platforms facilitate the continuity of traditional microfinance practices in migratory contexts. Simultaneously, the paper highlights a critical trade-off: the adoption of digital technologies may erode a fundamental aspect of tontines—the social bonds and interpersonal relationships that traditionally underpinned these financial networks.