A 9 de abril (quarta-feira), entre as 13h00 e as 14h00, o Anfiteatro 3 do ISEG (Edifício Quelhas, Piso 4) irá acolher uma nova sessão do 2º Semestre dos ISEG Research Seminars.
A speaker do seminário será Inês Faria, investigadora do ISEG, que apresentará o paper “Gender And Labour in Informal Economies: Digital Calamidades in Mozambique“, cujo abstract pode ser consultado mais abaixo.
Os seminários de Research do 2º Semestre decorrerão semanalmente até 4 de junho e contarão com a participação de docentes do ISEG e de outras escolas nacionais e internacionais. Saiba mais AQUI.
Entrada livre.
Abstract
Informal retail economies are prevalent at the global level and link specific supply chains to particular – material and digital – valuation processes. They occupy spaces between livelihoods, normative societal and legal frameworks and everyday life pragmatics. The local importance of informal economies differs globally and situationally, but in low-income settings they can represent about 90% of all entrepreneurial activities. Such informal livelihoods are deeply entangled with sociocultural configurations, including policy and regulatory frameworks of specific jurisdictions, and mundane elements of people’s everyday lives. Based on ethnographic research in Maputo, Mozambique, in this article I explore a particular case of informal economic activity – women-led digital calamidades (used clothing) markets on WhatsApp and Instagram, which are enabled by travelling technologies – mobile money and social media – and travelling disposable commodities – used clothes. I approach this as a form of digital entrepreneurship: a practice incentivized by different institutional actors promoting financial inclusion and market making as pathways for sustainable development. Implying a process of economic and semiotic (re)valuation that crosscuts both global circulation of objects and commodities, the businesses explored in this paper shed light into grounded aspects of labour, gender, class and household management dynamics embedded in the creation of digital markets. Sharing the story of Frederica, one of my research interlocutors, as an example, I argue that narratives incentivizing digital financial inclusion and entrepreneurship as a means to achieve gender empowerment and development have serious limitations: the increasing developmental focus on financial inclusion, technology and entrepreneurship seems to be lacking a solid foundation – focusing only on this dimension leaves other media of challenging inequalities, institutional insufficiencies, bureaucratic complexities and unequal power structures untouched.