The Dynamic Entanglement of Migration and Platform Work
Drawing on the concept of migration infrastructure, this talk by Roy Huijsmans (IISS, Rotterdam) investigates the dynamic entanglement of two significant social phenomena: migration and platform work. It is based on long-term ethnographic research (2019-2022) conducted among highly educated migrants who work as food deliverers through online platforms in The Hague, The Netherlands.
Speaker: Dr Roy Huijsmans, International Institute of Social Studies (IISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam
You can join this lecture in the IIAS conference room from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon, Amsterdam Time/CEST. It is not online.
All are welcome; registration is required due to limited seating.
The Lecture
With this talk, Roy Huijsmans seeks to contribute to the theorisation of the interplay between two major social phenomena: migration and the emerging platform economy. He does so by weaving together the concepts of youth mobility trajectories and migration infrastructure. This analytical frame is applied to ethnographic data generated through long-term research with a group of highly educated young adult non-EU migrants involved in platform-mediated food delivery work in the Netherlands. On this basis, Roy demonstrates how young adults’ mobility trajectories are both agentive projects of aspiration and complexly infrastructured in a co-constituting manner. Migration infrastructure, he shows, operates across and within space, and must be understood as a dynamic entanglement. This entanglement, and how one’s migration is experienced, changes over time. The lens of temporality illuminates certain migrant practices (managing the meanwhile), the development of particular subjectivities (self-identifying as an entrepreneur) and the (re)shaping of the course of mobility trajectories (staying in migration, and return).
The Speaker
Roy Huijsmans is a teacher and researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (IISS), part of Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research contributes to the social studies of childhood and youth, primarily based on ethnographic fieldwork in mainland Southeast Asia (mainly Laos) and the Netherlands. He has published on young people’s roles in migration, work (including platform work), and education, as well as their engagement with digital technologies, and on the concept of aspiration.
Registration (required)
All are welcome. Please register, as seating is limited.