Amanda Peticca-Harris, Grenoble Ecole de Management

Annalisa Murgia, University of Milan

Julieta Haidar, Workers' Innovation Centre-CONICET

This special issue examines how digital platforms function as systems that organise and reinforce inequality rather than simply producing it as an outcome. Platform labour operates as survival work for those already positioned within broader structures of inequality, including migrants, workers excluded from formal employment, and women managing care responsibilities. The issue seeks work that connects domains often treated separately—such as legal status, gender, and labour stratification—and explores how these intersect in shaping platform participation across geographical contexts.

Contributors are encouraged to examine how livelihoods are assembled through platformisation across labour, migration, and everyday life, with particular attention to care work and social reproduction. The issue also welcomes research on how workers navigate, adapt to, and contest platform-mediated inequalities through resistance, collective organising, and everyday survival strategies, recognising that agency emerges within the systems that organise inequality itself.

Appel publié par New Technology Work and Employment. Voir l'appel sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• To what extent do platform-based systems depend on inequality? How do they organise it?
• In what ways are insecurity and risk embedded within platform-based systems?
• How is labour supply structured through marginalised populations within platform economies?
• How are visibility, ratings, access to work, and valuation differentially organised across workers and contexts?
• How are platform systems becoming embedded across domains such as mobility, food, care, logistics, and urban life?
• In what ways do platform arrangements rely on, reproduce, and organise gendered, racialised, classed, generational, ableist, or otherwise undervalued forms of labour?
• How are livelihoods assembled through platform work across contexts shaped by migration, informality, and low incomes?
• How do workers combine multiple income streams, care responsibilities, and relational resources to sustain everyday life?
• What forms of agency, everyday tactics, informal solidarities, survival strategies, resistance, or adaptation emerge in response to inequalities embedded within platform-based systems?
• What methodological approaches can make visible the unequal, relational, embodied, and infrastructural dimensions of platform-mediated work and livelihood?

Timeline

• May 31, 2027: Full-length paper submission deadline

Rebecca Elliott, London School of Economics and Political Science

Sam Friedman, London School of Economics and Political Science

Ali Meghji, University of Cambridge

Aaron Reeves, University of Oxford

This project invites sociologists and scholars from around the world to reflect on the challenges facing higher education, including political censorship, marketisation, and institutional attacks on academic freedom. The call recognises that these pressures manifest differently across countries, from overt censorship in some nations to decades of marketisation and budget cuts in others, resulting in department closures and job losses.

The journal seeks commentary pieces that examine these conditions through multiple lenses: personal experiences situated within structural realities, historical and political analysis of current crises, and explorations of potential solutions. The project aims to provide a sustained platform for marginalised voices and to address long-term challenges facing academia globally, rather than serving as a short-term response to individual crises.

Appel publié par British Journal of Sociology. Voir l'appel sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• Personal experiences of censorship and marketisation in higher education in light of structural conditions
• Historical, political, economic, and cultural underpinnings of current crises in academia
• Potential solutions and transformations to address attacks on higher education
• Global perspectives on the conditions facing sociologists and scholars across different countries
• Impact of political censorship, xenophobia, and budget cuts on academic freedom and employment

Timeline

• September 30, 2026: Submission deadline