Short Abstract

This panel explores how remote and hybrid work reshape mobilities, identities, and belonging. It invites ethnographic reflections on digital infrastructures, legal regimes, precarity, and inequality as mobile, migrant, and displaced professionals negotiate work and life across borders.

Long Abstract

Remote and hybrid work are transforming how people move, connect, and sustain their livelihoods. Once tied to specific workplaces or (national) labor markets, professionals now navigate dispersed geographies of work. Yet these dispersed geographies remain embedded in persistent territorial logics: visa regimes, taxation systems, and national labor laws create friction even as digital platforms promise seamless connectivity. The promise of 'work from anywhere' collides with the reality that bodies, rights, and protections remain bound to specific places. These transformations reveal new forms of inequality and belonging that cut across digital, social, and territorial divides.

Cross-border work arrangements are embedded in diverse contexts, including digital nomads as well as displaced professionals. Remote work reconfigures questions of legal status, territorial belonging, and social recognition. It can be both a pathway to autonomy and a source of exclusion. It offers possibilities for sustaining livelihoods across borders and maintaining transnational ties, while simultaneously embedding workers in regimes of insecurity, jurisdictional ambiguity, surveillance, and uneven visibility.

This panel invites ethnographic contributions that examine how remote workers negotiate mobility, identity, and belonging. We seek analyses that illuminate the interplay between flexibility and precarity, connectivity and isolation, opportunity and constraint.

We particularly welcome papers that address:

– the everyday politics of remote and hybrid work across borders;

– digital infrastructures as sites of inclusion, control, and inequality;

– gendered, classed, and racialized dimensions of digital labor mobility;

– the regulatory challenges and legal precarity of cross-border remote work (visa status, taxation, labor rights);

– methodological reflections on researching distributed and hybrid workplaces.

This Panel has 4 pending paper proposals.
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