(Re)conceptualizing Precarity: A SWANA Feminist Approach to Researching Informal Gig Work

• In Event: 20417 - Gender and Work at the Margins: Criminalization, Legislation, and Local Context

Abstract

Mapping the context of the emerging gig economy is critical when conceptualizing how gig workers experience precarity at the micro and macro level, since there is a global divide in how the gig economy is researched. In this paper, I explore the means for an alternative approach to researching the gig economy whereby the experiences of gig workers are not universalized or marginalized; and where policy solutions for precarity disrupt neoliberal narratives that deem informal gig economies as inherently precarious. I propose a SWANA feminist approach to researching precarity, which defines precarity and envisions solutions for it based on gig workers’ own knowledges, relationalities and lived experiences. This proposition is based on doctoral field research in Cairo, Egypt (October 2022 to March 2023) where I focused on informal home-based gig work, which is often gendered and framed as inherently precarious by mainstream development discourses. I examine how women gig workers in the food tech sector use their social reproductive knowledges and relationalities to (re)define and navigate precarity in their daily work and life activities. A SWANA feminist approach to researching precarity (re)conceptualizes precarity as a fluid concept that involves both material and non-material factors and demonstrates how the degree and impact of precarity changes across time and space. The financial, resource and emotional management strategies utilized by women gig workers in their daily work and life highlights the significance of social structures and relationalities and the necessity of integrating social infrastructure in the analysis of labour, precarity, gender and development.

Author

• Laila Mourad, York University