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Educational institutions are investing heavily in the internationalization of their campuses to attract global talent. Yet, highly skilled immigrants face persistent labor market challenges. We investigate how immigrant academics experience and mitigate their double precarity (migrant and academic) as they seek employment in higher education in Canada.

We take a phenomenological approach and draw on reflective interviews with nine immigrant academics, encouraging participants to elaborate on symbols and metaphors to describe their experiences.

We found that immigrant academics constitute a unique highly skilled precariat: a group of professionals with strong professional identities and attachments who face the dilemma of securing highly precarious employment (temporary, part-time and insecure) in a new academic environment or forgoing their professional attachment to seek stable employment in an alternate occupational sector. Long-term, stable and commensurate employment in Canadian higher education is out of reach due to credentialism. Those who stay the course risk deepening their precarity through multiple temporary engagements. Purposeful deskilling toward more stable employment that is disconnected from their previous educational and career accomplishments is a costly alternative in a situation of limited information and high uncertainty.

We bring into the conversation discussions of migrant precarity and academic precarity and draw on immigrant academics’ unique experiences and strategies to understand how this double precarization shapes their professional identities, mobility and work integration in Canadian higher education.

This chapter discusses the impact of the sociological imagination and ethnographic research methods on identifying the ‘real’ nature of conceptualized phenomena. The examination is done by comparing the researcher’s experience of work-related precarity in ethnographic methods and in the researcher’s personal circumstances immediately following the fieldwork. Such a juxtaposition shows what had been emphasized by ethnography and the effects of the researcher’s social context on the concepts under study. In the case of fieldwork, many of the practical difficulties of precarious work were encountered. However, the context of being an ethnographer altered how work precarity was felt. In the personal circumstances that followed the fieldwork, precariousness was strongly felt in a more general manner. This occurred in a discrete event that involved multiple factors of employment, housing, institutions relied on, and personal relationships. Such differences between fieldwork and personal circumstances illuminate on the tendency to isolate phenomena in fieldwork, which poses the risk of making ethnographic reality out of ideal types.

This study examined changes in work precarity (i.e., job insecurity and income insecurity) and involuntary job loss following the start of the Great Recession in 2007 among people with and without disabilities. Using five waves of nationally representative data from the Americans' Changing Lives (ACL) panel study, the findings demonstrated that people with disabilities who had early experiences of income insecurity were more likely to experience later income insecurity than people without disabilities. Those who had a functional disability and experienced job insecurity and income insecurity at W1, in 1986, were also significantly more likely to experience involuntary job loss following the start of the Great Recession. These findings highlight the disproportionate impact of early work precarity for people with disabilities and are discussed as an application of the life-course concept of cumulative disadvantage.

Underlying much recent development in data science and artificial intelligence (AI) is a dependence on the labour of precarious crowdworkers via platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. These platforms have been widely critiqued for their exploitative labour relations, and over recent years, there have been various efforts by academic researchers to develop interventions aimed at improving labour conditions. The aim of this paper is to explore US-based crowdworkers’ views on two proposed interventions: a browser plugin that detects automated quality control “Gold Question” (GQ) checks and a proposal for a crowdworker co-operative.

The authors interviewed 20 US-based crowdworkers and undertook a thematic analysis of collected data.

The findings indicate that US-based crowdworkers tend to have negative and mixed feelings about the GQ detector, but were more enthusiastic about the crowdworker co-operative.

Drawing on theories of precarious labour, this study suggests an explanation for the findings based on US-based workers’ objective and subjective experiences of precarity. The authors argue that for US-based crowdworkers “constructive” interventions such as a crowdworker co-operative have more potential to improve labour conditions.

The study focussed on information literacy practices, specifically on how higher education staff managed the transition from established and routinised in-person teaching, learning and working practices to institutionally mandated remote or hybrid working patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The qualitative study forms part of a broader research project, examining how information literacy and information practices unfolded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Phase Three of this project, which forms the subject of this paper, employed semi-structured interviews to explore the impact of COVID-19 on the workplace and, in particular, the role that technology and digital literacy plays in enabling or constraining information literacy practices necessary for the operationalisation of work.

The complexities of the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a fracturing of workplace information environments and worker information landscapes by disrupting all aspects of academic life. The study recognises that whilst the practice of information literacy is predicated on access to modalities of information, this practice is also shaped by material conditions. This has implications for digital literacy which, in attempting to set itself apart from information literacy practice, has negated the significant role that the body and the corporeal modality play as important sources of information that enable transition to occur. In relation to information resilience, the bridging concept of fracture has enabled the authors to consider the informational impact of crisis and transition on people's information experiences and people's capacity to learn to go on when faced with precarity. The concept of grief is introduced into the analysis.

This study presents original research.

Settlement services in Canada have only recently started offering support and programming for emotional wellness issues faced by newcomers to Canada (immigrants who have been in Canada for less than 5 years). Funding for such services has steadily increased over the past 5 years, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Greater investment in ensuring the emotional wellness of immigrants is spurring new settlement services and programming. These include a wide array of configurations and approaches across the different geographies of Canada. This is evidence that providing such services for newcomers is in the early stages of implementation, characterised by experimentation and precarity. Mental and emotional wellness programming is in contrast with more established services, such as those meant to provide language learning, where common assessment tools, measures of proficiency and progress are well established. With funding from the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), this chapter features data from a 2-year project that examined emotional wellness services for immigrants offered in four cities in western Canada between 2018 and 2020. The study used surveys and interviews with clients and focus groups with front-line staff to understand client needs and discern the issues and impact of emotional wellness programming. Findings include apparent limitations in staff capacity and expertise to provide help when needed, the inappropriateness of service models meant for other contexts and complex funding requirements resulting in issues of access and the overall precarity of such programming.

In this chapter, we underscore the enduring importance of research on work, workers, labour markets, and the places and spaces of work. We then examine the particular and valuable contributions that come from ethnographic research in providing detailed studies of work, particularly when these are situated and interpreted in their wider socio-political contexts. We discuss the key dimensions of ethnography before overviewing the contributions to the volume. The volume presents cutting-edge ethnographic research on contemporary worlds of work and the experiences of workers from a range of contexts including an alternative community, working online, the gig economy, and the hospitality industry. Alongside novel empirical chapters, the collection includes the reflections of ethnographers with regards to, for example, the experience as a young female management researcher working amongst journalists in a media firm, personal feelings of precarity within and beyond the field, and how to navigate the challenges of researching inequalities ethnographically.

This paper aims to quantitatively explore the trends and patterns of the existing literature in the gig economy.

Using a total of 1,707 documents retrieved from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, bibliometric analysis using R-Biblioshiny and VOSviewer software was performed to map the studies in the gig economy.

The paper provides information on the most productive authors, countries and journals, as well as the emerging themes in gig research. It highlights the most prolific authors, with a notable presence from the USA and the UK, which are also the countries with the most publications and citations. China has also emerged prominently, both in terms of the number of publications and its involvement in thematic clusters and trending topics. Through co-word analysis and thematic clustering, the study provides information about emerging themes in gig economy studies, such as labor, technology, management and precarity. The results provide insightful information for comprehending the effects of gig labor in the contemporary workforce.

This study provides a comprehensive overview of the scholarly literature related to the gig economy, exploring the key insights by highlighting the evolving trends in gig research.

By mapping thematic clusters, tracking research evolution and identifying trending topics, it provides a unique perspective on the field's development and emerging areas of focus. It serves as a valuable means for addressing the challenges and opportunities presented by the gig economy.

Inequality in the creative industries often serves as the starting point for public debates over culture in the UK. Academic literature has long recognised the precarious nature of the fashion industry. This chapter offers a critical review of the relationships of power existing in the support offered to ethnic minorities in disadvantaged communities in the fashion and creative sectors in the UK. In addressing these issues, a Foucauldian perspective is adopted. The chapter focuses on Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) fashion entrepreneurs’ challenges in promoting young designers from disadvantaged communities.

Our findings show that the BAME entrepreneurs are active agents who are essential in identifying and shaping new creative and talented young designers. The chapter contributes to the debate through a critical review of the relationships of power existing in the support offered to ethnic minorities in disadvantaged communities in the fashion and creative sectors in the UK.

This conversation focuses on the reproduction of vulnerability incarceration and homelessness and presents the reflections of scholars, writers, activists and practitioners.

This paper is based on the conversations that took place on Disasters: Deconstructed Podcast livestream on the 31st of March 2022.

The prominent themes in this conversation include homelessness, incarceration, stigma and marginalisation.

The conversation contributes to the ongoing discussions around the reproduction of vulnerability and the importance of understanding its root causes of disaster scholarship, practice and activism.