Beyond the platform

Work mediated by digital platforms – where the platform brokers labour relationships between worker and client, consumer, or other end user – has become an increasing feature of the employment landscape across Europe. A substantial number of workers are engaged in online brokered delivery work, creating content for social media platforms, undertaking small digital tasks for unknown clients, or otherwise earning incomes through economic exchanges arranged through digital media platforms. Various studies recognize that platform labour experiences are heterogeneous, formed by and connected inextricably to gender, race, age, migration status, and other dimensions of the lifeworld. This talk will discuss one mechanism by which we may incorporate these elements into our approaches to researching platform work: social reproduction theory (SRT). SRT argues that work is always more than what happens at the point of production. It not only draws attention to feminised labour forms such as domestic work and care, insisting upon understanding them as forms of labour, but also asserts the importance of where, when, and how workers are produced and reproduced physically and mentally as workers, placing these activities within the parameters of what needs to be analysed to understand work. Due to SRT’s focus on how non-work aspects of life shape labour and its normative critical agenda, it has the scope to identify spaces for improving or enhancing the labour experiences of platform workers beyond intervening in the platform.

Prof. Kylie Jarrett is Professor of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin.  Kylie Jarrett has been researching the internet since the 1990s with a focus on the political economy of the internet, including social media. She is the author of Digital Labor (2022, Polity), Feminism, Labour, and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (2016, Routledge) and co-editor of the forthcoming Sage Handbook of Digital Labour (2025, Sage).

This lecture is a part of a series of events taking place in the beginning of June 2025 and is organized by the EU COST Action Platform Work Inclusion Living Lab that promotes an intersectional gender perspective and inclusion through increased well-being, economic justice, and rights for traditionally excluded collectives (TEC) while aligning the platform economy with The EU Pillar of Social Rights and SDGs. Jing Hiah, Assistant Professor in Criminology of the Erasmus School of Law and Anna Elias, PhD candidate at the International Insitute of Social Studies (ISS).