African digital labour and contemporary global capitalism

In discussions about the locations that make up the key productive nodes of the global digital economy, African workers rarely get a mention. Autonomous vehicles, machine learning systems, next-generation search engines and recommendations systems: how many of these technologies are ‘made… Continue Reading

Three visions for how information and communication technologies alter positionalities at global economic margins

I’m currently working on a book chapter about our ‘digital labour and gig economy‘ research. The chapter attempts to contextualise plans and projects to expand digital labour schemes by governments, third-sector organisations, and private sector actors. In writing the chapter, I thought it… Continue Reading

New paper: Digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods

As ever more policy-makers, governments and organisations turn to the gig economy and digital labour as an economic development strategy to bring jobs to places that need them, it becomes important to understand better how this might influence the livelihoods… Continue Reading

New Publication: Engagement in the Knowledge Economy: Regional Patterns of Content Creation with a Focus on Sub-Saharan Africa

We have a new publication out: Ojanperä, S., Graham, M., Straumann, R. K., De Sabbata, S., & Zook, M. (2017). Engagement in the knowledge economy: Regional patterns of content creation with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Information Technologies & International… Continue Reading

Hiring a Researcher at Oxford: Digital Entrepreneurship | Economic Geography | Sub-Saharan Africa

We are recruiting a full-time Researcher to work with us at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) on a project that critically assesses the changing landscape of digital entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Researcher will conduct a grounded, comparative empirical… Continue Reading

Mapping the Availability of Online Labour

Digitalization and the increasing connectivity across the globe have capacitated the emergence of an online labour market. A number of platforms now facilitate transactions between employers and employees, often based in very separate locations. These platforms cater for a variety of job types, ranging from… Continue Reading