Coming soon:
MacQuarie, J-C. (2024). A nightnography of food couriers: Social inequalities in platform work. In Urban Nightlife and Contested Spaces: Cultural Encounters after Dusk. Cities and Cultures series. Amsterdam University Press BV: Amsterdam.
Abstract: Food couriers working after dark are an under-researched group in“platform capitalism,” remaining relatively invisible in digitized cityscapes due to the nature of their night-time work. Drawing upon multi-sited in-person and digital nightnography in London (UK) and Cork (Ireland) and employing impressionistic mini portraits, this chapter documents experiences of precarity and inequality. It argues that existing literature often disembodies platform work, whereas today’s post-circadian capitalist era demands and extracts capital in traditional (bodily) ways through new denominations. Food couriers, especially those working after dark, are under duress from navigating traffic, waiting without getting orders, and staying alert. The chapter also highlights the gendered nature of platform work and contributes to debates on the digitalization of precarity and inequality.
Keywords: Nightwork, Gig workers, Migration, Exploitation, Gender, Discrimination
This open access book explores the use of visual methods in migration studies / Presents a practical use of various visual methods in researching migrants / Tackles the question of representation of migration in public discourse.
The Researcher’s Nightworkshop: A Methodology of Bodily and Cyber-ethnographic Representations in Migration Studies
CITE:
Macquarie, J-C. (2021) Researcher’s Nightworkshop: A Guide to Bodily and Cyber-ethnography to Make Visual Stories in Migration’. In Desille, A. and Nikielska, K. (eds)Visual Methods in Migration Studies. Springer Research Series. Rotterdam.
Abstract / The Researcher’s Nightworkshop methodology unveils the close relationship between the visual and touch senses. This innovative portfolio of tools captures the hidden experiences of migrants working the night shift (MWNS) and gives visual representations to research findings to create digital storytelling in migration. From collection to dissemination, the nightworkshop research design includes a set of core components needed to make visible night-to-night issues experienced by ‘invisible’ MWNS. The core components are night walking; observing and schmoozing; audio-visual recording; bodily notetaking; projecting short-films andpodcasting. A trilogy made of three short films about migrant night shifters complements the nightworkshop. All three short-films are research-based; and in all but one I used non-professional migrant actors. Invisible Lives, Nocturnal Lives and Nightshift Spitalfields are about ‘other workers’, MWNS in London. Each film marks a different time (politically – before and after EU transitional controls (2014) and before and after the Brexit referendum (2016-2020); different research stages and skill levels of the researcher/filmmaker (before, during and after my doctoral studies), and different a focus (four Romanian migrant night workers in London, (IL), the researcher and three migrant co-workers (NL), and one Bulgarian-Turkish co-worker and his family (NS). In each film, workers lack rights to decent work, are social isolated from day society, sleepless, mentally and physically exhausted.