News | Wednesday, 2nd March 2022
Doing Gig Work Exhibition
Exploring the working lives of couriers across Europe and the impact of digital technology on their relationships with their work and their customers.
Dr Cosmin Popan is organising an exhibition with food courier illustrations in Romania (4-13 March).
As part of the of the Digital Society Festival, the exhibition will travel to Manchester in June (6-11).
A website has been launched to tell the stories of couriers from Manchester and Cluj.
Work in the gig economy is characterised by opacity and alienation, digital platforms effectively hiding from view the intensive human labour that enables our daily instant gratifications.
For platform food couriers, this hidden work is concealed behind a dot moving on and across a map, deprived of identity or history.
At a time when the possibilities for social bonds and empathy with workers are often denied to us, this web project gathers courier stories from three European cities to show what lies behind the moving dot.
Using graphic illustrations, GIS data and audio diaries, this interactive multimedia platform aims to problematise the discourses of flexibility, independence and entrepreneurship surrounding gig work.
This platform is part of the research project Doing Gig Work, which studies the management, solidarity and resistance of platform food couriers in Manchester (UK), Cluj (Romania) and Lyon (France).
Dr Cosmin Popan is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow.
