Project description
Digital platforms and informal work in urban economies
Digital platforms are increasingly being used by small-scale workers in informal urban economies, changing how work is organised and blurring formal and informal labour. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the PEACH project investigates these platforms in Rio de Janeiro and Naples. Focusing on the beauty and personal care sector, it examines how apps and social media reshape work practices, visibility and occupations. Through an ethnographic approach combined with digital methods and labour law analysis, the project explores how platform-mediated practices interact with policy frameworks and identifies regulatory options that can support workers’ social protection and economic stability. Overall, PEACH re-centres informality in debates on platform economies.
Objective
The project “Platform-ised Economies Across Contexts of High Informality” (PEACH) explores how digital platforms (DPs) are reshaping small-scale economic exchanges in contexts marked by high informality and analyses how these practices are embedded within, challenged by, or incorporated into existing policy arrangements, as well as how they might be regulated in the future. PEACH adopts a global comparative focus between Latin America and Europe on urban areas characterised by high levels of informal work: one in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) and the other in Italy (Naples). The research will focus on the beauty and personal care sector (such as barbers, hair stylists, make-up artists, etc.), investigating how DPs blur the lines between formal and informal labour and reshape pre-existing jobs. Fieldwork will explore how DPs influence economic practices both when platforms act as intermediation infrastructures through sector-specific dedicated apps (e.g. AppBarber), and when they serve as tools of visibility and personal branding through social media (e.g. TikTok). Based on a multi-sited ethnographic approach, the project aims to foster a dialogue between labour ethnography and labour law, with the goal of understanding which regulatory outcomes are most necessary for platform-mediated workers in contexts of high informality to support their transition towards social protection and economic stability. The findings will feed into “Fair Platforms in Contexts of High Informality”, a set of policy guidelines to be developed in collaboration with Brazilian scholars and disseminated to a variety of audiences and stakeholders. By combining work ethnography, digital methods, and labour law analysis, PEACH is an interdisciplinary project that aims to re-centre the Global South in current debates on platform capitalism, while offering a new perspective that places informality at the core of the platform economy’s rise over the last decade worldwide.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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20122 Milano
Italy
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