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Accepted Paper:
The making of place and culture among home-based workers.
Elisabetta Costa
(University of Antwerp)
This paper explores the interplay between place, culture, and the digital, examining a recent global transformation enabled by digital technologies - the normalization of remote work among knowledge workers across the world.
Paper Abstract:
This paper explores the interplay between place, culture, and the digital, examining a recent global transformation enabled by digital technologies - the normalization of remote work among knowledge workers across the world. While remote work has been studied mostly in relation to increased geographic mobility, location independence, and the distinctive lifestyle of digital nomads, many remote workers in the knowledge economy experience constrained mobility and protracted hours in domestic spaces. Within this context, the house becomes the main physical locus for social and personal interactions. It is the place where an increasing number of global knowledge workers, IT professionals, and middle-class white collars spend most of their everyday lives. This shift is having long-standing consequences on social relationships within and beyond the family and is also shaping experiences of home and place. This paper builds on ethnographic research among middle-class professionals living in Groningen (NL) during the pandemic, and on the notes that I collected in 2023 and 2024 on my partner’s everyday life as a full-time remote worker. The paper examines the diminishing significance of physical social interactions that coexist with the increasing importance of online relationships. It discusses how this change is having consequences on the experience of being in the world, and on practices and meanings of family and home. Exploring the daily lives of remote workers in both physical and digital realms provides insights into a profound shift impacting contemporary digital societies, which is the making of culture across expanded digital spaces and diminished physical environments.