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This paper investigates how a Moroccan trade union, anti-mafia Sicilian farmers, a local administration, and a cooperative navigate Italian labor migration policies, strategically using digital platforms to promote their agendas.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores the establishment of a labor corridor designed to recruit Moroccan workers for two farms in Valledolmo, Sicily. Drawing on ongoing patchwork ethnography, the study highlights how non-state mediators navigate Italian labor migration policies and discourses, employing digital platforms to advance their agendas amidst the liberalization of Italy’s labor market.

The initiative originates from a Moroccan trade union, which views the new regulatory framework for labor corridors as a safer and more manageable pathway for North African workers to access Italy.

The union's efforts to combat cross-border labor exploitation aligns with the pressing demand for foreign labor in Sicily's depopulated inland areas, where agricultural production faces mounting challenges due to climate change and neoliberal globalization pressures. By integrating seasonal foreign workers into local labor and housing systems, the municipal administration seeks to establish an innovative, sustainable agricultural model that addresses informal hiring practices and labor exploitation.

Central to this mediation is a digital platform designed to match labor supply with demand. Initially promoted as a tool to combat gangmastering and labor mafias, the platform has been repurposed by Moroccan workers-to-be migrants as a strategic resource for circumventing systemic exploitation and bureaucratic inefficiencies in their journey to Italy.

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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.

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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'.

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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 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.

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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 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.

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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 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.

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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 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.