[Air-L] Call for papers -- Migration, migrant work(ers) and the gig economy -- Environment and Planning A
Mark Graham
immedium at gmail.com
Mon Jun 29 07:36:44 PDT 2020
Dear colleagues,
For anyone doing work at the intersection of migration and the gig economy,
please see the below call for papers.
Please do be in touch with any questions or ideas.
Mark
*Call for papers - Migration, migrant work(ers) and the gig economy -
Environment and Planning A*
The study of platform-mediated gig work has granted insufficient critical
attention to questions of migration and migrant labour. My colleagues,
Niels van Doorn, Fabian Ferrari, and Srujana Katta, and I, are putting
together a theme issue
<https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/EPA%20theme%20issue%20GRAHAM%20et%20al-1591195179817.pdf>
of Environment and Planning A to address that gap (see also our working
paper on Migration and Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy
<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3622589>).
One set of questions that contributors to the theme issue may address
concerns the structural role of migrant labour in sustaining the gig
economy. Without a steady influx of migrants, platform companies like Uber,
Ola, Helpling, Rappi, and Deliveroo would have trouble maintaining their
labour supply in almost any of the cities in which they operate. As is the
case for the informal economy, the precise numbers of migrants working in
the gig economy remains unclear, due to the lack of comprehensive publicly
accessible data on the topic. However, from New York to Santiago to Cape
Town to London, it is clear that migrant workers play an outsized role in
providing the labour power behind a range of services offered in the gig
economy, where the distinction between formal and informal labor is
frequently blurred. Even in India and China, countries with huge domestic
labour markets, internal migrants play an oversized role in providing key
gig economy services such as ride-hailing, domestic work, and food
delivery. In this sense, it is evident that migrant labour serves an
infrastructural function for these platform companies—one that is as
vitally important as the steady influx of investment capital—and its
governance at the intersection of labour market regulation and immigration
policy forms a critical institutional condition for their business model’s
viability.
Another set of questions concerns migrants’ lived experiences of work and
social reproduction within the gig economy. The relative ease of finding
work through platforms enables a valuable lifeline for migrants, who often
face significant barriers to formal employment and welfare provision.
However, compared to native-born gig workers, migrants often face
additional dimensions of precarity as a result of their migrant status. For
example, they are often subject to discrimination from consumers and
co-workers alike, face accusations of depressing wages, and encounter
substantial uncertainty with shifts in policy regimes (e.g. Brexit). Crises
like the COVID-19 pandemic render workers with irregular immigration status
especially precarious, as their tenuous existence at society’s economic and
socio-legal margins inhibits their access even to the marginal support
afforded by platforms and/or governments. It is clear that—as in other
contexts of precarious work—migrants’ working lives in the gig economy are
forged at the intersections of workplace conditions, labour market and
welfare regulation, migration policy, and public attitudes towards
migrants.
In order to bring questions around migration and migrant labour to the
forefront of debates on the gig economy and platform-mediated work, and to
thereby connect these debates to broader concerns pertaining to migrants’
position in low-wage labour markets and informal sectors, this theme issue
of EPA: Economy and Space will bring together new and original scholarship
on these topics. The ‘gig economy’ in this context is understood broadly,
to comprise both location-based platform labor and remote cloud/crowdwork
platforms. We invite papers and commentaries including, but not limited to:
-
The role of migration in local and global platform-mediated labour
markets;
-
The intersections of migration, welfare, and labour market policies, and
their impacts on gig workers and gig economy platforms;
-
The opportunities and challenges of platform-mediated gig work for
migrants;
-
Migrants’ overlapping experiences with gig work and other kinds of
formal and informal labor arrangements;
-
The socially reproductive struggles and strategies of migrant gig
workers and their families;
-
Labour market segmentation and inequalities in the gig economy due to
intersecting factors such as immigration status, gender, race/ethnicity,
nationality, education, and age.
-
Labour platforms’ hiring, management and promotional strategies with
respect to migrant workers;
-
The impacts of changing migration policy (e.g. Brexit) on migrant gig
workers;
-
The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on migrant gig workers;
-
Policy approaches to creating and sustaining decent working and living
conditions for migrant gig workers.
This special issue of Environment and Planning A on “Migration, migrant
work(ers) and the gig economy,” is edited by myself (Mark Graham
<https://fair.work/people/mark-graham/>, University of Oxford), Niels van
Doorn
<https://www.uva.nl/profiel/d/o/n.a.j.m.vandoorn/n.a.j.m.vandoorn.html>
(University of Amsterdam), Fabian Ferrari
<https://fair.work/people/fabian-ferrari/> (University of Oxford), and Srujana
Katta <https://fair.work/people/srujana-katta/> (University of Oxford).
This call is an open invitation to submit paper proposals (in the form of a
one-page extended abstract, plus one-paragraph bio sketch for each author).
Following an initial review, conducted by the guest editors in conjunction
with EPA’s coordinating editor, invitations will be extended for
full-length paper submissions. Consistent with EPA’s procedures for theme
issues, all papers will be subject to peer review. Paper proposals for the
planned theme issue on “Migration, migrant work(ers) and the gig economy”
<https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/EPA%20theme%20issue%20GRAHAM%20et%20al-1591195179817.pdf>
should be submitted to the EPA Journal Administrator at epa at sagepub.co.uk
by September 1, 2020. The review of proposals will be completed within 4
weeks. Please be in touch if you’d like to informally discuss any ideas.
*Summary and timeline *
*September 1, 2020* Closing date for submission of one-page paper proposals
EPA Journal Administrator at epa at sagepub.co.uk
*October 1, 2020* Invitations to submit full-length papers
*January 31, 2021 *Deadline for submitting full-length papers
*Summer 2021* Completion of peer review, papers scheduled for publication.
*Related reading*
Graham, M. 2020. Regulate, replicate, and resist – The conjunctural
geographies of platform urbanism
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02723638.2020.1717028>. *Urban
Geography*. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2020.1717028
Katta, S., Badger, A., Graham, M., Howson, K., Ustek-Spilda, F., &
Bertolini, A. (2020). (Dis)embeddedness and (de)commodification: COVID-19,
Uber, and the unravelling logics of the gig economy
<https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/29CEVXEWKSHWYGEW5QAG/full>. *Dialogues
in Human Geography*. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620934942
van Doorn, N., Ferrari, F., and Graham, M. 2020. *Migration and Migrant
Labour in the Gig Economy: An Intervention*
<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3622589>. Working
paper.
van Doorn, N., and Badger, A. 2020. Platform Capitalism’s Hidden Abode:
Producing Data Assets in the Gig Economy
<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anti.12641>. *Antipode. *
Woodcock, J., and Graham, M. 2019. *The gig economy: a critical
introduction*
<https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/The+Gig+Economy%3A+A+Critical+Introduction-p-9781509536368>.
London: Polity
------------------------------------------
Mark Graham
Director, Fairwork
www.fair.work
Professor, University of Oxford
www.markgraham.space
New books:
Graham, M. (ed). 2019. *Digital Economies at Global Margins*. Cambridge MA:
MIT Press.
Woodcock, J. and Graham, M. 2019. *The Gig Economy: A Critical
Introduction.* Cambridge: Polity.
Graham, M, Kitchin, R., Mattern, S., and Shaw, J. (eds). 2019. *How to Run
a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables.* London: Meatspace Press.
Graham, M and Dutton, W. H. (eds). 2019. *Society and the Internet: How
Networks of Information and Communication are Changing our Lives (second
edition).* Oxford: Oxford University Press.
<http://twitter.com/geoplace>
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