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This article explores the relationship between migration and the gig economy, specifically focusing on the experiences of migrant workers in urban gig work. The authors argue that while gig economy platforms can offer opportunities for migrants to improve their livelihoods, they often lead to poor working conditions. The article emphasizes the complex factors that shape migrant gig work, including institutional barriers, personal and professional trajectories, and labor market governance. The authors call for a more comprehensive understanding of the role of migration in the gig economy in order to improve the conditions for this diverse workforce. The text also examines the role of platform companies in defining and prioritizing the work of migrant workers, as well as the behaviors and networks that migrant workers engage in to maintain their distinct status. It explores the experiences and agency of individual migrant workers in platform work, as well as the challenges they face in terms of career pathways and workplace identity. The article concludes by discussing the future of the gig economy and the need for regulatory interventions to enhance the working conditions of migrant gig workers. [Extracted from the article]

In this article, we examine how remote gig workers in Africa exercise agency to earn and sustain their livelihoods in the gig economy. In addition to the rewards reaped by gig workers, they also face significant risks, such as precarious working conditions and algorithmic workplace monitoring, thus constraining workers' autonomy and bargaining power. Gig workers, as a result, are expected to have fewer opportunities to exert their agency – particularly so for workers in Africa, where the high proportion of informal economy and a lack of employment opportunities in local labour markets already constrain workers' ability to earn livelihoods. Instead, we demonstrate how remote workers in Africa manage various constraints on one of the world's biggest gig economy platforms through their diverse everyday resilience, reworking and resistance practices (after Katz, 2004). Drawing from a rich labour geography tradition, which considers workers to 'actively produce economic spaces and scales', our main theoretical contribution is to offer a reformulation of Katz's notions of 'resistance', 'resilience' and 'reworking' as everyday practices of gig workers best understood as 'hidden transcripts' of the gig economy (Scott, 1990). The article draws on in-depth interviews (N=65) conducted with remote workers during the fieldwork in five selected African countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gazetteers are dictionaries of geographic place-names that have important implications far beyond the worlds of geographers and cartographers. By containing ‘definitive’ lists of places, gazetteers have the ontological power to define what will and will not be geocoded and represented in databases, maps, search engines, and ultimately our spatial understandings of place. This paper focuses attention on GeoNames, which is the world's largest freely available and widely used gazetteer. We illustrate how content in GeoNames is characterised by highly uneven spatial distributions. There are dense clusters of place-names in some parts of the world and a relative absence of geographic content in others. These patterns are related not just to the wealth and population size of a country, but also to its policies on Internet access and open data. The paper then traces some of the specific implications of this information inequality: showing how biases in gazetteers are propagated in a variety of geographic meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E ast A frica has traditionally been characterized by stark b arriers to nonproximate communication and flows of information. It was the world's last major region without fibre-optic b roadband Internet access, and until the summer of 2009 had been forced to rely on slow and costly satellite connectivity. This all changed when the first of four fibreoptic cables was connected in Kenya: bringing with it the promise of fast and affordable Internet access for the masses, and the ability of the country to move towards a knowledgebased economy. Within the context of this moment of change, this paper explores the ways that managers of outsourcing firms envisage 'connectivity.' Over the course of forty-one interviews, contradictory spatial imaginaries were discovered. When describing their perceptions of the country's new technomediated positionalities, many interviewees repeated visions that allowed geographic frictions to evaporate. But when managers were asked about their actual mediated positionalities, they presented a very different world: one of barriers, frictions, and the very real role that distance continues to play in the world's economic peripheries. The goal of this paper is to interrogate why we see such stark disconnects between perceptions and practices of connectivity. The contradictions could be seen as an exposition of a scalar schism between internationally operating regimes of tru th (ie, powerful discourses that have their origin nonlocally) and local experiences and practices in Kenya. Alternatively, we can think about the contradictory accounts of connectivity as emergent from strategic spatial essentialisms that are practised to achieve particular goals. By focusing on the contradictions embedded into the ways in which people speak about connectivity in the Kenyan outsourcing sector, we can learn much about how arguments about the entanglement of connectivity, growth, and development are operationalized. 'Connectivity' is offered as a necessary, and sometimes even sufficient, condition from which growth and economic development can be brought into being: a set of spatial imaginaries th a t conveniently support a national development strategy of remaking Kenya in the contemporary knowledge economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on enormous amounts of online and networked data that is becoming part of the layers, experiences, and landscapes of place. He informs that the social scientists and geographers have recently understood this rapid expansion of user-centered, locational media. It further informs that the technologies underpinning this rapid expansion are seemingly stateless, are constantly shifting.

This paper analyzes the digital dimensions of places as represented by online, geocoded references to the economic, social, and political experiences of the city. These digital layers are invisible to the naked eye, but form a central component of the augmentations and mediations of place enabled by hundreds of millions of mobile computing devices and other digital technologies. The analysis highlights how these augmentations of place differ across space and language and highlights both the differences and some of the causal factors behind them. This is performed through a global study of all online content indexed within Google Maps, and more specific analyses of the linguistically and topically segregated layers of information over four selected places. The uneven linguistic geographies that this study reveals undoubtedly influence the many ways in which place is enacted and brought into being. The larger aim of this project is to use these initial mappings of the linguistic contours of the geoweb to push forward a broader debate about how augmented inclusions and exclusions, visibilities and invisibilities will shape the way that places become defined, imagined, and experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents answers to several questions including one related to the locational data and practices, second related to neogeography and another related to opportunities in volunteered geographic information (VGI).