Panel convenor: Ilse van Liempt (Utrecht University)
Panel Abstract
The study of platform-mediated work has gained considerable academic interest. Even though studies show that without the work of migrants, platform companies would have trouble maintaining their labour supply in many cities across the world, not much has been written on the role of migration and migrant labour in the platform economy.
This call for papers focuses explicitly on food delivery work provided by irregular migrants. We are interested in irregular migrant’s lived experiences in the food delivery sector as well as theoretical contributions on the relationship between migration and the platform economy. The few studies on migrant work and the platform economy available show that it enables a valuable lifeline for irregular migrants (van Doorn et al. 2022, Van Doorn & Vijay 2021) who often face significant barriers to formal employment and welfare provision. It also shows that as a result of their lack of legal status migrant workers in the food delivery sector often face additional dimensions of precarity (Altenried 2021, Barratt et al. 2020, Lam & Triandafyllidou 2021, Zhou 2022).
We invite papers on:
* The opportunities and challenges of food delivery work for migrants and their families;
* The heterogeneity of migrant workers in performing food delivery work and how different positionalities shape modes of in/exclusion
* The intersections of migration, welfare, and labour market regimes and how the food delivery sector is situated in it;
* Inequalities in the food delivery economy due to intersecting factors such as immigration status, gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, education, and age;
* Mobilisation strategies of migrant food delivery workers;
* Policy approaches to creating and sustaining decent working and living conditions for migrant food delivery/gig workers.
Please sent a short abstract of up to 250 words (including name, affiliation and contact details to Ilse van Liempt (