What’s in a Network? Infrastructures of Mutual Aid for Digital Platform Workers during COVID-19

This paper examines the role played by informal mutual aid networks in mediating precarity for gig workers in Jakarta during COVID-19. Using an original survey of 350 mobility platform drivers conducted in May 2020 and a pre-pandemic set of semi-structured interviews with driver communities, I find that mutual aid dispersed through associative, informal labor networks became an essential infrastructure of support for drivers during the pandemic. Most drivers in Jakarta were able to mobilize pre-existing labor networks for extensive material and emotional support. However, results indicate this support was not universally accessible: the pre-pandemic structures of a driver’s community and the driver’s own participation within the community correlated with the magnitude of community support a driver reported receiving. By putting CSCW literature in conversation with broader literature on informal urbanism, this paper shows how informal labor networks and mutual aid can be a transformative, even outside of formal union structures. By analyzing the forms and limits of these networks this paper also carries lessons in how to build solidarity amongst distributed workforces. At the same time, this study highlights the role of local socio-economic context in shaping gig worker experiences of the pandemic. Thus, it points to the need for more contextually driven analysis of both gig worker precarity and what are deemed effective forms of labor solidarity

Crescimento do e-commerce no Brasil: desenvolvimento, serviços logísticos e o impulso da pandemia de Covid-19

<p>O progresso técnico e sua difusão pelo território materializa-se na criação de novas redes, sejam elas de transportes, comunicação, distribuição etc. Produto da divisão social, territorial e internacional do trabalho, as redes estruturam e reestruturam as interações entre os indivíduos e o espaço constantemente. Nesse contexto, emerge o e-commerce como uma nova ferramenta de comercialização, marketing e distribuição de mercadorias. O objetivo deste artigo é demonstrar o processo de desenvolvimento do e-commerce no Brasil, bem como a relação dele com os serviços logísticos. Para que o e-commerce pudesse, de fato, difundir-se pelo território brasileiro foi necessário que, além das claras seguranças econômica e jurídica, houvesse um razoável aparato de redes e objetos técnicos. No entanto, não só o avanço das redes de comunicação e da melhoria do aparato técnico da população explicam a expansão do comércio eletrônico no Brasil, mas também questões conjunturais advindas das necessidades objetivas, como o caso do impulso dado ao e-commerce pela pandemia do Covid-19. Neste artigo sustentamos o argumento que o estudo da expansão do e-commerce no Brasil pode ser analisado a partir de três eventos: a expansão e a popularização das redes de internet, a difusão do uso de smartphones e os impactos da pandemia do Covid-19.</p><p><span>Abstract</span></p><p>GROWTH OF E-COMMERCE IN BRAZIL: DEVELOPMENT, LOGISTIC SERVICES AND THE IMPULSE OF THE PANDEMIC OF COVID-19</p><p>Technical progress and its diffusion across the territory materializes in the creation of new networks, be they of transport, communication, distribution, etc. A product of the social, territorial and international division of labor, networks constantly structure and restructure interactions between individuals and space. In this context, e-commerce emerges as a new tool for the commercialization, marketing and distribution of goods. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the development process of e-commerce in Brazil, as well as its relationship with logistics services. So that e-commerce could, in fact, spread throughout Brazilian territory, it was necessary that, in addition to clear economic and legal security, there should be a reasonable apparatus of networks and technical objects. However, not only the advancement of communication networks and the improvement of the population’s technical apparatus explain the expansion of electronic commerce in Brazil, but also conjunctural issues arising from objective needs, such as the case of the impulse given to e-commerce by the pandemic of the Covid-19. In this article we support the argument that the study of the expansion of e commerce in Brazil can be analyzed by three events: the expansion and popularization of internet networks, the spread of the use of smartphones and the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.</p>

Football in Lusophone Africa

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the game of football has spread across the territories of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa—Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe—quickly becoming part of the daily life of main colonial cities. It was introduced by Portuguese settlers and by individuals of other nationalities; in particular, members of the English business diaspora. Religious missions and schools as well as migrant individuals from trade and labor networks were all agents in the expansion of the game which, since the first decades of the century, has become integrated into the leisure practices of different imperial territories through the formation of clubs, associations, and tournaments. Sports associations were the most mobilizing form of its integration in the Portuguese colonial empire. This network became more extensive in colonies that were significantly urbanized, more populated, had more dynamic economies, and that had more settlers, who increasingly became fans of the game and followed competitions in the newspapers and on the radio. The institutionalization of the game incorporated the discriminatory structure of the Portuguese colonial system. The logic behind official sports policies created by the Estado Novo regime (1933–1974), which until the early 1960s did not include natives (indígenas), was thus applied. And yet, Africans soon took over the game, creating their own clubs and competitions. Resistance to Portuguese colonialism forced political changes, which resulted in a war fought on three different fronts, but also in a gradual abandonment of official policies of racial discrimination. In the colonial football sphere, this opening, combined with the development of a professional market, led to the movement of African players first to colonial clubs, and then to metropolitan clubs, and even to the national team. The fame and talent of these players, especially Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, ultimately helped in disseminating official government propaganda of a multiracial empire.

Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai (What Is behind the Stardom)?

With her vigorously libidinous dancing, her infamous “jhatkas and matkas,” Madhuri Dixit, the leading Hindi actress of the late 1980s and the 1990s, initiated a whole new movement vocabulary for the Hindi film heroine. Dixit’s moves carried the unmistakable imprint of the choreographer who led her to stardom, Saroj Khan. With her six-decade-long career, Khan constitutes a remarkable, embodied archive of Bombay cinema’s industrial practices in relation to dance performance and choreography. Chapter 5 delves into Khan and Dixit’s co-choreography of a new style of movement, reading choreography as an archival-corporeal system of transmission and transformation that articulates body cultures, industrial systems, and labor networks. A focus on training, rehearsal, and collaboration foregrounds the creative processes in their co-choreography that produced new techniques of the body, which both women continue to build on through richly intermedial careers in film, reality TV dance shows, and on web platforms.

Epilogue

The Epilogue extends this book’s examination of dance and female stardom up to the present and points to further areas of exploration that a focus on film dance opens up. It includes an examination of the changing role of the heroine as the “item girl,” Bollywood intertextuality through dance, and new modes of participatory fandom evidenced in reality dance shows. This is followed by a brief summary of how music- and dance-centered histories and theoretical frameworks help us think differently about cinematic performance, spatial organization, and labor networks. It concludes with a meditation on how this book’s sustained engagement with film dance produces an intermedial history of film, dance, and music.

Making the Desert Bloom?

World War one witnessed the first dense flow of Indian labor into the Persian Gulf. To reconstruct the campaign in Mesopotamia/Iraq after the reverses of 1915-16, the Indian Army demanded non-combatants for dock-work, construction labor and medical and transport services. This chapter explores the Government of India’s anxious deliberations about the choice of legal form in which to meet this demand. The sending of labor for military work overseas had to be distanced conceptually from the stigmatized system of indentured labor migration. There was a danger of disrupting those labor networks across India and around the Bay of Bengal which maintained the supply of material goods for the war. Non-combatant recruitment took the war into new sites and spaces. Regimes of labor servitude were tapped but some form of emancipation had to be promised. The chapter focusses on seven jail- recruited Indian Labor and Porter Corps to explore the work regime in Mesopotamia. Labor units often insisted on fixed engagements rather than ‘duration of war’ agreements, but had to struggle for exit at the conclusion of their contract. After the Armistice, Britain still needed Indian labor and troops in Mesopotamia but sought to prevent the emergence of a settler population.

Toward an Infrastructural Sublime: Narrating Interdependency in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Los Angeles

This article examines the vibrant city infrastructures of Karen Tei Yamashita's 1997 novel Tropic of Orange in order to highlight interdependency as political and aesthetic value. The novel's emphasis on urban support systems—the oft-unnoticed roads, pipes, wires, and labor networks that allow the city to function—positions infrastructure as itself a critical lens, one that can reassess the relationship of ethnic American literature and subjectivity to the values of self-ownership, protest, and independence. By amplifying the overlooked support networks that underpin fictions of self-sufficiency, Yamashita's Tropic of Orange diverges from the narrative of self-ownership as liberatory endpoint. Instead, it recuperates the much-maligned category of dependency, positioning dependency as a vital site of aesthetic and political possibility within anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle. This recuperation proves particularly significant in light of pernicious and persistent dependency mythologies, such as the “illegal immigrant,” that frame racialized subjects as drains on the public. Infrastructure, as an often unseen entity nonetheless central to the operation of cities and the global distribution of resources, represents a key vehicle in Tropic of Orange for thinking about contemporary ecologies of assistance, power, and provision, and for mapping the global imbalances of power that render certain dependencies hypervisible while erasing others.

Book Review: Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships: A Critical Examination of Labor, Networks, and Community

As the title suggests, a major theme of this edited volume is partnership. While every digital humanist to some extent defines digital humanities (DH) in subjective ways, there is widespread consensus that DH work requires interdisciplinary collaboration of the sort in which each partner’s disciplinary knowledge and expertise are respected. These conditions of mutual respect should be obtained whether or not the partner is a student, an MLIS- or PhD-credentialed librarian, an archivist, an alt-ac worker, or an academic faculty member (non-tenure track, tenure-track, or tenured). Inevitably, there are frictions within traditional academic hierarchies. For example, the chapter by Risam and Edwards recounts the unequal terms of participation for faculty and librarians in grant-funded work. Problems of credit-sharing are a feature of many chapters.

Possibility and Peril: Trade Unionism, African Cold War, and the Global Strands of Kenyan Decolonization

Trade unionism was at the leading edge of African freedom struggle in the 1940s and 1950s. It was an incubator where different visions of decolonized futures vied for ascendency after WWII. This article analyzes international labor networks and trade union activism in Kenya to explore the entanglements of decolonization and Cold War from Africa in the 1940s to 1960s, an era when competing modes of anticolonial internationalism laid paths to independence. This story is told in two phases. Through Makhan Singh, the article assesses the influence of Indo-African connection, Marxism and the radical left on labor organization over the 1940s. Then, through Tom Mboya, the article charts Kenyan affiliation to the anticommunist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) from the early 1950s. It shows how this internationalist volte-face transformed Kenya’s trade union landscape, propelled anticolonial agitation and, by the late 1950s, wrought irreparable fractures in fledgling pan-African institutions over the very nature of postcolonialism. The article argues that mobile African labor leaders coproduced, domesticated, and molded Cold War networks—that the conduits of early global Cold War agency ran both ways. Singh and Mboya were interlocutors in pluripotent world conversations marshaled for African decolonization. They also helped delineate the terms of global dialogue at a moment of neocolonial peril and decolonizing opportunity. This calls on historians to define alternative chronologies of globalist possibility masked by the tighter constraints placed on African states in the later twentieth century.