Documents Triandafyllidou, Anna 5 results

"Canada boasts some of the most highly educated migrants in the world, but it is well recognised that these migrants face many labour market barriers to gainful employment despite their experience and qualification. Administrative data indicate that the proportion of gig workers is considerably higher among migrants, yet little is known about the various perceived and desired pathways of migrants who choose to pursue platform work. In this inductive, qualitative study, we interviewed 35 platform workers in Canada regarding why and how they turned to such forms of work and how it fits their overall plans for integrating into the Canadian labour market. Adopting a grounded theory approach, we found six pathways into platform work ranging from those who feel in control of the situation as a means to an end, to those who feel trapped in it, unable to find alternatives. We question how these pathways relate to macro factors (e.g. immigration status, professional status), meso factors (e.g. education and skills, networks) or micro factors (e.g. stage in life cycle, aspirations). In our analysis, we consider the critical insights offered by scholars on racial and platform capitalism in understanding the factors impacting migrants' pathways into platform work in Canada. Our findings suggest that these structural inequalities are further perpetuated within platform work, even though in theory Canada's immigration system is merit-based with emphasis on high human capital. Migrants' engagement in platform work is a piece of a larger puzzle of segmented labour markets."

"As pandemic lockdowns forced many traditional office workers to work from home, a subset of these workers left their countries of employment altogether to join a growing movement of location-independent transnational digital workers. These digital nomads have captured the imagination of mainstream and social media, which have promulgated images of laptop laden millennials from the Global North working within sight of a beach in Bali one month and from an Airbnb in a hip Buenos Aires neighborhood the next. Despite the media attention, academic scholarship on this topic is limited. What does exist appears primarily in the business and management literature, especially journals focused on information technology (IT) and tourism, as well as the sociological subfield of leisure studies. To date, scholars of migration have barely engaged with the topic, despite the subliterature on lifestyle migration (Benson & O'Reilly, 2009) providing a valuable theoretical antecedent to discussions of digital nomadism. This paper offers a critical overview of what is known about digital nomadism so far and argues that migration scholars should seriously consider this topic in the years ahead. Theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches from migration scholarship could help to better understand what digital nomadism means for the future of work and the social contract between citizen and nation-state. There are also important implications for the nomadlands—the destinations where these remote workers temporarily reside. The recent appearance of over 30 digital nomad visas is one early sign of destination countries considering a policy response."

‘Delving into everyday experiences of a range of migrants and hearing their own voices, this chapter discusses how newcomers exercise agency to seize opportunities offered by their country of settlement and mitigate the effect of the turbulent social, political and economic circumstances they often meet with.

To understand migrants' capabilities and agency, we not only look at their lives over the last five years but also explore their more distant memories long before their migration. Analysis of their past experiences enables our better understanding of their motivation for emigration, of barriers and opportunities they were facing and of their individual capacity for change and resistance. Looking back into their past also enables us to explore in-depth the reciprocal relationship between their agency and the sociocultural context.

The analytical accent is specifically placed on the turning points and emerging epiphanies of migrants' lives as well as on issues of intersectionality which heavily determine migration outcomes. We mostly emphasise the narrative thematic analysis (composite biographies) and its combination with data from other levels of inquiry, or cross-level analysis."