Paper short abstract

This paper examines how transnational professionals within European academia negotiate fragmented workplaces, uneven digital demands and shifting regimes of recognition.

Paper long abstract

Remote and hybrid academic work has unsettled long-standing assumptions about mobility, presence and belonging within European universities. Once grounded in shared physical spaces and collegial rhythms, academic labour is now reorganised through digital infrastructures that promise flexibility while generating new forms of fragmentation, precarity and affective ambivalence. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Slovenia with lecturers, researchers, administrators and early-career academics, this paper explores how digital platforms, institutional metrics and hybrid work arrangements reshape everyday academic life and the conditions under which people sustain professional identities and attachments.

Participants describe a university environment marked by ambiguous connectivities: they are continuously connected yet feel increasingly disconnected from colleagues, students and organisational life. Hybrid work expands possibilities for cross-border collaboration but also intensifies temporal pressures, erodes boundaries between life and labour and deepens inequalities between those with stable positions and those navigating precarious contracts or migratory trajectories. Digitalisation amplifies surveillance through performance indicators, automated reporting systems and expectations of permanent availability, producing forms of affective and epistemic precarity.

For migrant and mobile academics, hybridity generates additional layers of uncertainty regarding recognition, integration and institutional belonging. Rather than a neutral technological shift, hybrid academic work emerges as a socio-technical infrastructure through which regimes of visibility, value and legitimacy are reconfigured.

By situating these experiences within broader debates on labour, mobility and digital governance, the paper argues that contemporary academic work demands an anthropology attentive to the infrastructural, affective and political stakes of remote and hybrid environments.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on research with displaced Ukrainians in Czechia and Germany, this paper examines how cross-border remote work sustains professional continuity while producing social and affective frictions shaped by war, displacement, and precarious legal and social conditions.

Paper long abstract

When they left their home country after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, some Ukrainians relied on remote work arrangements to continue working with employers or clients during displacement, using digital connections to sustain livelihoods across borders. These arrangements can present an opportunity to sustain relationships with their professional network and to circumvent the hurdles to entering the labour markets in their host countries.

At the same time, working remotely with team members in a country at war produces ongoing practical and emotional challenges, such as electricity cuts in Ukraine, adjusting meeting times to colleagues affected by airstrikes, or feelings of guilt associated with being in a safe place. Moreover, not being able to engage in everyday casual interactions in person, some feel increasingly disconnected from their coworkers.

Drawing on research with displaced Ukrainians in the Czech Republic and Germany, this paper examines how transnational remote work is experienced as both a strategy of continuity and a source of disjuncture. We explore how digital connections produce social and affective frictions that are embedded in wider mobilities, including visiting Ukraine for work events and the formation of communities among displaced workers. Our paper contributes to debates on remote work and displacement by examining how working with colleagues in a country at war (re)shapes professional boundaries, affective relations, and processes of integration in host communities.

Paper short abstract

Based on 16 months of ethnography, this paper explores placemaking within the context of immigration for foreign remote workers in Mexico City. In particular, it will address how social stratification shapes attaining “good” residency pathways even within the hyper-mobile remote work community.

Paper long abstract

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Mexico City has risen to prominence as a global hub for remote work. Many remote workers with jobs, clients, and financial ties to the United States have relocated to Mexico City. The majority of these workers enjoy strong purchasing power and can easily reside in Mexico City, with or without formal residency visas. Concurrently, remote workers in Mexico City have been increasingly blamed for gentrification and the rising cost of living. Because of this, there has been tension around the ease with which remote workers are able to come and stay in Mexico. Against this backdrop, how do migrant remote workers make sense of their placemaking?

In this paper, I examine remote workers’ placemaking practices within the context of Mexican immigration. While remote workers are characterized by their mobility, the group is heterogeneous. Ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City highlights both the ease with which remote workers can make long-term stays on tourist permits and stratification with attaining formal residency visas. Yet, it is clear that at local and national levels, Mexican government bodies have embraced various immigration pathways for remote workers. For many residents outside the community, the phenomenon is viewed with frustration within the broader lens of Mexico-U.S. migration; American remote workers receive “visas like candy” and Mexicans are unable to do the same. Ultimately, this paper explores remote work in the context of belonging, tourism, and migration.

Paper short abstract

Remote work transformed Indian migration to Japan post-pandemic—removing barriers for men, enabling women to keep careers, and letting couples share childcare. But isolation became a hidden cost. This paper explores how digital work is reshaping skilled migration, mobility, and belonging.

Paper long abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic posed significant challenges for migrants, and those in Japan were no exception. Border closures, prolonged family separations, and loss of employment severely impacted Indian professionals and their families. This led to questions about their sense of belonging and future in Japan—some even considered leaving. However, once the borders reopened, Japan became an even more attractive destination for Indian talent than before. The rise of remote and hybrid work allowed for unexpected opportunities for both men and women. For men, remote work removed longstanding barriers like navigating Japan's demanding office culture, long commutes, and language challenges. For women who relocated as trailing spouses, remote work meant they could arrive with jobs already in hand, rather than putting their careers on hold. It also opened doors for existing migrant women who had been unable to re-enter the workforce due to childcare pressures. For couples, hybrid arrangements enabled shared childcare responsibilities, with one respondent noting, "It takes a village to raise a child. For us, remote work was that village." This shift was not without challenges. Isolation, time zone differences, lack of local colleagues, and difficulty integrating into Japanese society became significant issues. This paper draws on interviews with Indian migrants in Japan to explore how remote work reshaped the lives of skilled migrants, highlighting the evolving nature of migration and digital work in a post-pandemic world.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, we take the case of creative workers, originated from the Global North but living in the Mediterranean Europe (Greece) to explore 1) how privilege is being structured through their experiences living in Greece and working for the Global North 2) how their sense of belonging and attachment is being shaped by the local conditions 3) how policy frames the discussion around remote work and digital nomads producing a racial, gendered, hierarchy of foreigners in a society that bears high migration pressures. Drawing on qualitative research and social listening, the article demonstrates how creative entrepreneurial work and its qualities is being valorised as a superior form of work and thus, is completely detached from its local surroundings. We argue that sustaining a place to the digital creative economy constitutes a privileged regime that requires from contemporary workers the eagerness to relocate – if not, being always on the move. We call this creative work on the move as it describes the precarious working and living conditions of an ingrowing segment of creative workers from the Global North.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how digital nomads address the social challenges of hypermobility by consuming commodified communities in coworking and coliving spaces, showing how mobility and neoliberal market logics reshape belonging into a modular, on-demand resource.

Paper long abstract

Note: This presentation draws on a paper that has already been published.

Mobilising portable technologies and global internet connectivity, digital nomads decouple work from place, rejecting the sedentary norm of living in a single location in favour of continuous geographic mobility. However, while often celebrated as emancipatory, the itinerant lifestyle also exposes nomads to social isolation, prompting many to seek community in coworking and coliving spaces. These digital-nomad-centred enterprises market vibrant social environments as central selling points, placing belonging behind paywalls and offering connection as a privatised, commodified service. Drawing on 14 months of multi-sited fieldwork and interviews with participants from a dozen countries, the paper ethnographically examines how digital nomads manage the social challenges of hypermobility through the consumption of commodified communities, utilising the communal affordances of coworking and coliving spaces to balance mobility with belonging under constrained temporalities. Embedded in neoliberal logics, such practices reveal how digital nomads approach community through market rationalities, treating it as a service to be purchased and consumed in pursuit of optimising their transnational social lives. In sum, the paper highlights how digital nomadism sits at the intersection of mobility, consumerism and neoliberal ideology, where ‘community’ becomes modular—temporary, interchangeable and available on demand—while generating new forms of mobile belonging.