This track gathers papers that reflect on methodological challenges, innovations, and issues requiring more scholarly attention. We aim to stimulate discussions on how the heterogeneity and opacity that characterize platform labor impact the methods and conceptual approaches we deploy to study how people in different parts of the world are working and attempting to generate livelihoods through platforms that strategically (dis)embed themselves in/from their surroundings. 

This track is dedicated to papers investigating how a combination of institutional dynamics and business strategies incentivize the (in)formalization of platform labor in particular settings. In this context, we are also interested in exploring how such dynamics and strategies stimulate various forms of professionalization among workers trying to sustain themselves on platform-generated incomes. What does ‘professionalization’ entail in different regions and industries of the platform economy, and how are efforts to professionalize related to dynamics of labor degradation and devaluation? 

This track brings together papers broadly representing two strands of research. On the one hand, it welcomes scholarship on how tech companies and other kinds of organizations (fail to) govern their platforms in different parts of the world. On the other hand, it gathers research on varieties of platform regulation and the relationship between platforms and public institutions. In this track, we are thus interested in papers that examine governance by platforms as well as the multiscalar governance of platforms, especially in light of how both have become increasingly entangled in various forms of neoliberal statecraft and state capitalism. 

This track features research on the manifold ways in which platforms intersect with the efforts of households, communities, and institutions to sustain themselves over time. We welcome contributions on the relation between platforms/platformization and the unevenly manifesting ‘crisis of care’, including the role of platforms in restructuring ‘global care chains’ and volunteer-based social services. We are especially interested in papers that highlight hitherto under-researched areas, practices and dynamics of platform-mediated social reproduction. Moreover, we wonder how ‘new’ ideas about the social value or potential of platforms complement or reconfigure ‘established’ notions of community, care, and sustainability?

This track focuses on the extent to which platforms have challenged or reconfigured existing modes of capital accumulation. We welcome papers that examine a variety of platform-based business models and accumulation strategies, as these emerge from particular capitalist legacies and institutional settings across the globe. More specifically, we are interested in research on platform-governed extractive practices, supply chains, and rent-seeking strategies that cross borders and connect cities and regions around the world. We encourage scholars to interrogate platformization’s impact on wealth inequalities and on culturally situated understandings as well as legal codings of ownership and property.

This track focuses on emerging and re-invigorated forms of (organized) resistance among various types of platform ‘complementors’; from gig, warehouse, and factory workers to Airbnb hosts, content creators, ecommerce sellers and software developers. We aim to examine the creation of coalitions at multiple scales, within and across industries, and with various missions, in order to explore the possibilities they create for the worker-led curbing of corporate platform power. We particularly welcome papers that investigate alternative platforms as well as alternatives to platforms. What other infrastructures (digital or otherwise) are being created and imagined by workers across the globe?