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This paper investigates how highly-skilled migrants of Brussels, engaged in hybrid or remote work, negotiate a sense of belonging in a new country. I explore specifically whether working from consumption-driven "third places of work" can be seen as participation in a neighbourhood.

Paper long abstract

Brussels is one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse cities in Europe, with a large and versatile migrant community. According to latest statistics, around 70% of Belgians work from home one or two days a week. In this paper, I explore how, in such a cosmopolitan context defined by increased international mobility, people create a sense of belonging while they engage in digitally enabled remote work. 

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted as part of ReWorkChange research project. Building on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of production of space (1974) and Doreen Massey’s understanding of space as a “product of interrelations” (2005: 9), I examine how contemporary remote workers in Brussels develop meaningful connections to urban spaces they inhabit. Drawing on the anthropological understanding of participation as “membership in social groups and ritual activities” (Goodwin and Goodwin, 2004: 222) or, simply, being part of something (Pina-Cabral, 2018), I investigate how the dynamics of participation become visible in an urban context where participation is mainly bound to capitalist frames of consumption, such as cafes, which people use for working remotely.

Focusing on highly-skilled migrants across a range of occupations (creatives, white collar employees, and freelance professionals) who work remotely from so called “third places of work” (cafes, co-working spaces, public libraries) this paper explores how they negotiate a sense of belonging in a new country.

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This paper examines class relations, social inequalities and political ‘consciousness’ in a neighbourhood in Mexico City. It traces the webs of changing and emerging relations as mobility is redistributed across time and space while the economic and social status of my interlocutors shifts.

Paper long abstract

In the aftermath of the COVID‑19 pandemic, Mexico City experienced a rapid expansion of gig‑ and platform‑mediated work alongside national political claims of a growing middle class. This paper examines how the digitalisation of manual and household‑based labour reconfigures class positioning and perception among workers in a Mexico City neighbourhood. Many households transformed living spaces into micro‑production units (bakeries, talleres) and mobilised social media as vernacular marketplaces. Others combined remote laptop work with manual labour to secure livelihoods amid economic inflation and rotational labour practices, as they move in and out of the self‑perceived middle class. For some, income from these activities enabled the externalisation and formalisation of businesses; many, however, preferred the temporal flexibility of home‑based production, which allowed them to maintain care obligations. I foreground mobility—physical, virtual and social—as the relational axis that ties together those who procure labour, producers and clients. This redistribution of mobility (Xiang, 2022)reshapes webs of dependency, opportunity and aspiration, entangling consumers and producers in shifting economic landscapes and enabling rapid class recomposition. These are kin‑ and friend‑based informal labour arrangements that do not only emerge from precarity- as adaptations to an unstable economy- but also reflect active choices by my interlocutors. This informality must be understood within the context of neoliberal digitalisation, high mobility (Giddens, 1975; Weber, 1978) and as work performed as an act of care (Narotzky and Besnier, 2014). This paper contributes to debates on class in the digital and offers analytical tools to scale social inequalities and change beyond class.

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This paper situates digital nomadism within postcolonial theory to interrogate whether, and to what extent, their everyday practices of transnational mobility can be read as postcolonial formations.

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This paper situates digital nomadism within postcolonial theory to interrogate whether, and to what extent, their everyday practices of transnational mobility can be read as postcolonial formations. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial scholarship, the contribution questions the dominant narratives that frame digital nomadism as an expression of freedom, agency, and individual choice, and instead foregrounds the power relations, inequalities, and historical legacies that shape the trajectories of this highly visible form of mobility. The analysis combines theoretical reflection with qualitative examination of popular media sources.

Theoretically, the paper conceptualises digital nomads as neoliberal subjects who deploy individualised exit strategies—such as geographic arbitrage and outsourced labour—to navigate crises in affluent industrialised countries, while relying on global inequalities rooted in colonial histories. Empirically, the paper identifies three dimensions through which coloniality shapes digital nomads’ habitus: tourism-oriented imaginaries of place, an internalised ethos of productivity, and an embedded “institutional whiteness” that normalises Western cultural dominance, English as a global language, and asymmetric economic relations.

The findings suggest that digital nomadism operates as a depoliticised form of coloniality, extending capitalist value extraction and cultural hierarchies into destinations historically shaped by colonial relations. The paper concludes that digital nomads exemplify the figure of the postcolonial neoliberal subject and argues for the necessity of incorporating intersectional, non-Western, and place-based perspectives into future research on lifestyle mobilities.

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This paper examines workaway practices as a form of mobility enabled by remote work that plays a significant role in the reproduction of social inequalities in Milan, Italy. Workaway has become a marker of inequality embedded in historically situated practices of privilege and distinction.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines a form of mobility enabled by remote work that plays a significant role in the reproduction of social inequalities in Milan, Italy. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the ERC CoG project ReWorkChange, a comparative study of the social consequences of remote work across eight countries, the paper analyzes how “workaway” practices have emerged as new markers of social distinctions (Bourdieu 1984).

In recent years, Milan, the economic capital of Italy and the center of the more affluent Lombardy region, has experienced growing social inequalities. The paper focuses on the ability of middle-upper class families to spend the summer months working remotely from the seaside or mountains locations. Escaping the increasingly hot and unliveable urban environment of Milan is widely perceived as a privilege reserved for a minority of professionals who can benefit from so-called smart work and who often own second homes outside the city.

The paper further argues that these contemporary “workaway” practices extend and reshape long-standing patterns of class-based inequalities in Italy. During the twentieth century, a key marker of social distinction was the possibility for women and children to spend the summer months by the sea or in mountain locations. This practice was affordable to wealthy families with a single (male) breadwinner and access to second homes. Today, remote work reproduces and transforms this class-specific notions of good life, and functions as a marker of inequality that is embedded in historically situated practices of privilege and distinction.

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The paper examines remote work as a mobility infrastructure shaping ‘homeland’ mobilities of Ghanaian-background youth living in Germany. Spatially and temporally flexible work enables transnational entrepreneurship, an unfolding relationship to a ‘homeland’, and non-linear transitions to adulthood.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the intersections of digitally enabled remote work, migration, and mobilities. Existing research has shown that remote work can generate new vulnerabilities for migrants while also strengthening their agency to shape their lives, careers, and education. However, this literature has largely focused either on digital nomads and their relatively privileged international mobilities or on labor migrants’ local mobilities within digitally mediated platform work. This paper shifts the focus to migrant-background youth and examines how digitally enabled remote work functions as a mobility infrastructure that enables and reshapes ‘homeland’ mobilities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with young people of a Ghanaian background between Germany and Ghana as part of the DIGIMOBYOUTH project, I analyse experiences of both employed remote workers and ‘diaspora entrepreneurs’ who founded their own start-ups. The paper shows how location-flexible work arrangements allow youth to engage in more frequent and extended stays in Ghana, to combine paid work with leisure and family, and to pursue forms of transnational entrepreneurship imbued with 'purpose' and oriented toward both Germany and Ghana. Using three case studies, the paper demonstrates how: (1) work-related ‘homeland’ mobilities are embedded larger mobility trajectories and contribute to an evolving relationship to a ‘home’ country; (2) ‘homeland’ stays function as sites of entrepreneurial experimentation that give rise to new ideas and experiences but are also shaped by frictions; and (3) remote work contributes to decentering traditional pathways to adulthood by reconfiguring the spatial and temporal coordination of work, mobility, and life-course transitions.

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Drawing on ethnography with migrant remote workers in transnational call centers in Greece, this paper examines how virtual labour mobility, employer-organised migrant mobility and forms of territorial and spatial immobilisation intersect in the context of everyday home-based remote work.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among remote workers in Greece's expanding call center industry, this paper examines how multiple, overlapping forms of virtual and physical (im)mobility intersect in the case of non-EU migrant call center workers, many of whom originate from Tunisia. These workers are recruited directly from Tunisia via temporary work permits sponsored by call center firms to perform digital service work from within Greece, under mandated work-from-home (WFH) arrangements. While their labour circulates transnationally through "virtual migration" (Aneesh 2006), their everyday lives as migrant remote workers in Greece are shaped by forms of territorial and spatial immobilisation. EU and Greek migration policies tie their contracts and residence/citizenship rights to call center firms in Greece, restricting their labour mobility and reinforcing their legal dependence on employers. Moreover, as their "globally mobile" digital work is performed from home under rotating schedules and rigid surveillance/control, many of them describe experiencing isolation and confinement to the domestic sphere, contrary to dominant narratives of flexibility brought by remote work.

The paper argues that this configuration constitutes a regime of "bonded" remote work, where borders and territorial-spatial enclosures are not bypassed by outsourcing and digitalisation, but actively mobilised to fix mobile migrant workers in place and enable value extraction for transnational digital corporations. By exploring this specific articulation of migration governance, home-based remote work and digital labour mobility, the paper contributes to panel discussions by showing how remote work regimes reshape everyday (im)mobilities, legal and social belonging for migrant workers in an EU border context.

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Remote and hybrid workers in Bucharest move between home and cafés as everyday workplaces. Based on ethnographic research, this paper shows how such mobility is shaped by classed and spatial practices, revealing how digitally enabled flexibility is unevenly lived in the post-socialist city.

Paper long abstract

This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the ReWorkChange project on the social consequences of remote work, examines how remote and hybrid workers in Bucharest navigate between home and cafés as everyday workplaces, and how these movements are shaped by class understood as a bundle of relational, spatial, and moral practices through which inequality is lived and reproduced (Carrier & Kalb 2015).

In a post-socialist city marked by housing inequalities and a growing specialty coffee scene, cafés function as regular, though not always affordable, sites of work for long-term residents. For many workers, working from home is constrained by small apartments, shared households, housing precarity, or social isolation, making cafés popular places of work.

Rather than treating home and cafés as separate workplaces, this paper takes workers’ mobility between them as its central focus. It asks when, why, and under what conditions particular places are chosen, showing how decisions about where to work emerge from negotiations between material constraints, such as housing, cost, and commuting, and the symbolic and moral work of performing a coherent and flexible life. Enabled by digital technologies, this mobility turns the choice of workplace into a recurring practice shaped by practical demands and aspirational concerns about productivity, comfort, and belonging.

Engaging with debates on post-socialist middle-class formation (Crăciun & Lipan 2020) and cafés as infrastructures of class-making (Petrovici & Faje 2019), the paper argues that the flexibility associated with remote work is unevenly lived and produced through classed and spatial practices in Bucharest.

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Examining Cluj's coworking spaces as infrastructure for the remote creative class, this ethnography reveals the precarity behind the freedom rhetoric. It explores how workers navigate digital mobility and physical anchoring through neoliberal practices.

Paper long abstract

Over the past decade, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) has aggressively rebranded itself as a "creative city," attracting a flux of digital nomads and remote workers within a polarized urban landscape. While remote work enables mobility, it often generates a counter-desire for physical "anchoring" and community. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with freelancers and entrepreneurs in Cluj, this paper examines coworking spaces not merely as offices, but as nodes of ideological dissemination where the tension between mobility and immobility is navigated.

I argue that these spaces function as paradoxes: they promise a return to community while actively facilitating the neoliberal subjectivation of the worker. The paper analyzes how the entrepreneurship of the self becomes a prerequisite for inhabiting these spaces. Furthermore, I critically reconstruct the chain of precarity obscured by the visual rhetoric of creative freedom.

Workers navigate this precarious landscape by transforming social relations into social capital, using the coworking space to stabilize their professional identity. By looking at how subjects align their values with the dominant logic of competition and self-branding, I explore whether coworking spaces offer genuine possibilities for resilient community-making or if they merely serve as transient stations that reproduce the polarizations of the neoliberal economy. The research thus highlights how the immobile infrastructure of the coworking hub shapes, and extracts value from, the mobile imaginaries of the contemporary workforce.