Short Abstract

This panel explores the interconnections between im/mobilities and digitally enabled remote work, understood as working practices detached from conventional office settings and enabled by digital technologies.

Long Abstract

This panel explores the interconnections between im/mobilities and digitally enabled remote work, understood as working practices detached from conventional office settings and enabled by digital technologies. Over the past few years, remote work has become normalised as an important aspect of people’s lives across different professions, social classes and geographic regions. Remote work gained widespread adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is now the new norm for many knowledge workers worldwide. Does digitally enabled remote work generate new forms (im)mobility? Which ones and how?

Bringing together diverse ethnographic studies of digitally mediated remote work, this panel aims to foster reflections on how this transformation of work is shaping the ways people imagine, desire, and practice im/mobility across different life stages and contexts. For some, remote work represents an opportunity to settle in one place; for others, it may offer a way to avoid migration or, conversely, a tool for embracing ongoing mobility. For others still, it might provide a means to return to a desired homeland. Remote work can also enable temporary and seasonal mobility. In sum, remote work can reshape not only patterns of migration and everyday mobilities, but also fundamental concepts of relations to places and everyday politics, such belonging, community-making, and citizenship.

The panel welcomes ethnographically grounded studies on the connections between im/mobilities and digitally enabled remote work across various types of workers and individuals, including platform workers, white collars employees, and freelance professionals.

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