The Racial Borderscapes Series: this series explores the relationship between the racialised migration systems and the everyday life of borders. The series is co-ordinated by Professor Suzanne Hall.
A nascent literature is emerging that explores the role of racialisation and other modes of social differentiation in the emergence of platform economies (van Doorn & Vijay, 2021; Gebrial, 2022; Foster, 2024; Ramachandran, 2024). This scholarship redresses gaps in platform capitalism literatures, situating racialised bordering and dispossession as key contexts through which real-existing platformisation is developing. Yet – if social differentiation processes are exploited to provide on-demand, cheap app-based labour, in what ways do platforms restructure these relations to produce new racial formations? As it becomes increasingly clear that platforms – through evasions of regulatory norms – are becoming sites of absorption of the labour of racialised surplus populations, the question emerges of how platforms alter what it means to be part of racialised urban infrastructural workforces.
This talk explores this provocation through a study of on-demand childcare platforms. Based on a 4-year multi-sited, multi-method platform work ethnography, it theorises the changing role and legibility of racialisation in the age of computational capitalism; and therefore, the varying subjectivities racialised labouring populations are called upon to inhabit in times of overlapping urban crisis.
Meet our speaker and chair
Dalia Gebrial is a Lecturer in Geography and Social Justice at Kings College London. Her research focuses on empire, race, labour, digital economies, globalisation and political economy. She is also a political and cultural commentator and has frequently contributed to media outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, Vice, BBC Radio 4, Sky News, BBC Politics Live and Novara Media.
Suzanne Hall is Professor of Sociology at LSE and Head of Department. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation.
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