N Van Doorn
Biographic Data
| ID | 18261 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Van Doorn |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Doorn |
| SIGNATURE | VAN DOORN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7379-8661 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 756 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Continuity and change
This article reports on a Roundtable Workshop organised to reflect on the continuities and changes in the geographically variegated development of the gig economy and to assess the state of the art in gig economy research. The workshop brought to light how, despite growing academic attention over the past decade, gig economy research still grapples with a number of blind spots that deter advancements in the field. The main contribution of the wor…
The contingencies of platform power and risk management in the gig economy
This paper demonstrates how gig platforms can become both a resource for risk management and a new source of risk, depending on the complex interaction between a platform’s labour management strategies on the one hand and the mix of support structures and dependencies in a worker’s life on the other
Migration, migrant work(ers) and the gig economy
Migration; gig economy; migrant workers; digital labour platforms; platform economy
Gig work as migrant work
With markets concentrating predominantly in and around large cities, gig platforms across the globe seem to depend as much on the cheap labor of migrants and minorities as on investment capital and permissive governments. Accordingly, we argue that there is an urgent need to center migrant experiences and the role of migrant labor in gig economy research, in order to generate a better understanding of how gig work offers certain opportunities and…
Migration and Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy
In urban gig economies around the world, platform labour is predominantly migrant labour, yet research on the intersection of the gig economy and labour migration remains scant. Our experience with two action research projects, spanning six cities on four continents, has taught us how platform work impacts the structural vulnerability of migrant workers. This leads us to two claims that should recalibrate the gig economy research agenda. First, w…
Platform capitalism’s social contract
What kind of social contract underwrites platform capitalism? Based on findings from the Platform Labor research project, this essay argues that we are seeing the emergence of different gendered “platform fixes”
The Gentrification of Airbnb
In this article, we argue that it is analytically productive to think about the professionalization of hosting on Airbnb in terms of (commercial) gentrification. More precisely, we believe that rent gap theory is helpful to advance our understanding of why and how professionalized hosting has become an increasingly salient phenomenon and for centering the active role of Airbnb as a platform operator. We develop the notion of platform-scale rent g…
Actually Existing Platformization
In this article we examine the partnership as a heterogeneous boundary resource that enables platforms to generate dependencies, become locally embedded, and gain power in urban settings. Pushing back against narratives of platform-driven disruption, which tend to universalize and totalize platform power, we discuss three cases of what we term "actually existing platformization"-a path-dependent and locally situated process in which platform comp…
Odds stacked against workers
This article presents a cross-national comparative study examining how American and Chinese platform companies approach the gamification of on-demand food delivery. The study, based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Beijing, shows how couriers in these cities negotiate the gamified app-based systems designed to convince them to log in and keep working. We argue that such systems are not only a salient form of 'algorithmic management'…
Stepping Stone or Dead End
Platform Capitalism’s Hidden Abode
In this article, we argue that the governance of gig work under conditions of financialised platform capitalism is characterised by a process that we call “dual value production”: the monetary value produced by the service provided is augmented by the use and speculative value of the data produced before, during, and after service provision. App‐governed gig workers hence function as pivotal conduits in software systems that produce digital data …
At what price? Labour politics and calculative power struggles in on-demand food delivery
This article asks what can be gained by making calculability a pivotal demand for wage politics in gig economies characterised by dynamic fee structures. It examines how a small group of Berlin-based food delivery workers attempted to challenge Deliveroo's market power by building their own makeshift calculative equipment to help them 'reverse engineer' the company's fee pricing algorithm. It then documents the difficulties these 'riders' experie…
Civic Intimacies
This ethnographic book focuses on how Black queer people in Baltimore build support structures in the face of ongoing violence and insecurity in their lives. The author advances the concept of “civic intimacies” to account for a range of practices that enable Black queer Baltimoreans to not only survive but also thrive, as they employ strategies of care and belonging to navigate through civic institutions. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fie…
A new institution on the block
This article argues that Airbnb should be understood as a new urban institution that is transforming relations between market, state, and civil society actors. Taking the Airbnb Citizen advocacy initiative as my case, I examine how this transnational “home sharing” platform achieves such transformations, which in turn requires an investigation into the specific nature of Airbnb as an institutional form. Assuming the agenda-setting role of the urb…
A good hustle
In this article, we examine how models working on Chaturbate, one of the world’s most popular adult webcam platforms, negotiate and make sense of the dynamic ways in which this platform configures their competitive environment. By combining different perspectives from the field of economic sociology, we demonstrate how competition on Chaturbate is shaped by various market devices whose strategic negotiation informs – and is informed by – the mora…
Platform labor
How does one value something one cannot and often does not want to see? How do contemporary digital platforms and their infrastructures of connectivity, evaluation, and surveillance affect this relationship between value and visibility, when it is mediated through the problem of labor as at once a commodity and a lived experience? And how can these infrastructures be mobilized in projects that aim to build different kinds of platforms - the kinds…
The fabric of our memories
This article examines how the practices of self-preservation and other-directed care within Baltimore’s gay leather community are entangled with the material fabric of leather. I argue that leather forms a mnemonic technology that mediates between intimate experience and collective memory, thereby enabling leathermen to develop affective attachments to both the past and the future of their shared form of life. Ultimately, my aim is to attend to t…
Forces of Faith
This essay examines what it means for queer subjects to cultivate a concern for their lives and the lives of others in the face of debilitating circumstances, when these efforts are maintained through religious practices and attachments. Taking cues from a small yet growing strand of social science research that has investigated the role of religion and "spirituality" in queer people's everyday lives, I explore how the experience of a divine pres…
The Neoliberal Subject of Value
In this essay, I introduce the figure of the “neoliberal subject of value” to explore the affective ambiguities of what Tiziana Terranova has termed “free labor,” or the voluntary, unwaged, and exploited activities that generate the digital data, content, and connections central to informational capitalism. If, as Terranova argues, free labor is characterized by exhaustion—due to the lack of means by which this labor can sustain itself—why are mi…
Treatment is Prevention
The past 15 years have seen the waning of both cultural analysis and activism dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention, especially in relation to the enduring epidemic in the United States. However, current mutations in the American HIV prevention landscape, driven by the biomedical promise of a ‘Test and Treat’ strategy, are producing potentially destructive outcomes for vulnerable and dispossessed communities, a situation that demands renewed investmen…
Architectures of 'the Good Life
This paper examines how the practices and events of queer collectivity might encourage us to think differently about the relationship between sexuality, intimacy, and citizenship. Through the exposition and discussion of four 'scenes' based on ethnographic engagements with various LGBT collectives in Baltimore, MD, it attends to the visceral and more-than-human registers in which a fragile sense of community comes into being, subsequently develop…
Assembling the Affective Field
This article recounts what happens when an increasingly commonplace technology such as the smartphone is mobilized in ethnographic fieldwork practice, investigating the particular research-related affects and intimacies that are produced by/in this sociotechnical assemblage. I start with a brief account of my research project, after which I discuss the ways in which my smartphone has informed and modulated the different components of my fieldwork…
Between hope and abandonment
This paper investigates how current transformations in HIV prevention in the USA are intensifying a logic of viral containment rooted in biomedicine and behavioural science, in order to curb the recent rise in new HIV infections, predominantly among young African-American 'men who have sex with men'. Based on fieldwork in Baltimore, I examine how this paradigm shift is translated into concrete prevention activities that focus on HIV testing and t…
Digital spaces, material traces
This article argues that in order to cultivate a more thorough understanding of how gender, sexuality and embodiment come to ‘matter’ in digital environments, it is necessary to reconsider the notion of the virtual as it relates to everyday reality, in addition to rethinking the digital in relation to our common conception of materiality. To develop such an understanding, the discussion is organized around three sections. The first section addres…
Construction of the Khoja Zaynuddin Mosque
As part of an ongoing project at the World Heritage Site of Bukhara, we investigated the glue used in the construction of the Khoja Zaynuddin mosque. Analysis by a range of techniques confirmed that it consisted of a collagen-based glue. However, the glue contained many non-protein constituents. The presence of lipid material suggests that the glue was produced by a relatively unsophisticated process. More surprisingly, various marker compounds o…
Platform labor
How does one value something one cannot and often does not want to see? How do contemporary digital platforms and their infrastructures of connectivity, evaluation, and surveillance affect this relationship between value and visibility, when it is mediated through the problem of labor as at once a commodity and a lived experience? And how can these infrastructures be mobilized in projects that aim to build different kinds of platforms - the kinds…
Migration and Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy
In urban gig economies around the world, platform labour is predominantly migrant labour, yet research on the intersection of the gig economy and labour migration remains scant. Our experience with two action research projects, spanning six cities on four continents, has taught us how platform work impacts the structural vulnerability of migrant workers. This leads us to two claims that should recalibrate the gig economy research agenda. First, w…
Platform Capitalism’s Hidden Abode
In this article, we argue that the governance of gig work under conditions of financialised platform capitalism is characterised by a process that we call “dual value production”: the monetary value produced by the service provided is augmented by the use and speculative value of the data produced before, during, and after service provision. App‐governed gig workers hence function as pivotal conduits in software systems that produce digital data …
Gig work as migrant work
With markets concentrating predominantly in and around large cities, gig platforms across the globe seem to depend as much on the cheap labor of migrants and minorities as on investment capital and permissive governments. Accordingly, we argue that there is an urgent need to center migrant experiences and the role of migrant labor in gig economy research, in order to generate a better understanding of how gig work offers certain opportunities and…
Odds stacked against workers
This article presents a cross-national comparative study examining how American and Chinese platform companies approach the gamification of on-demand food delivery. The study, based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Beijing, shows how couriers in these cities negotiate the gamified app-based systems designed to convince them to log in and keep working. We argue that such systems are not only a salient form of 'algorithmic management'…
A new institution on the block
This article argues that Airbnb should be understood as a new urban institution that is transforming relations between market, state, and civil society actors. Taking the Airbnb Citizen advocacy initiative as my case, I examine how this transnational “home sharing” platform achieves such transformations, which in turn requires an investigation into the specific nature of Airbnb as an institutional form. Assuming the agenda-setting role of the urb…
At what price? Labour politics and calculative power struggles in on-demand food delivery
This article asks what can be gained by making calculability a pivotal demand for wage politics in gig economies characterised by dynamic fee structures. It examines how a small group of Berlin-based food delivery workers attempted to challenge Deliveroo's market power by building their own makeshift calculative equipment to help them 'reverse engineer' the company's fee pricing algorithm. It then documents the difficulties these 'riders' experie…
A good hustle
In this article, we examine how models working on Chaturbate, one of the world’s most popular adult webcam platforms, negotiate and make sense of the dynamic ways in which this platform configures their competitive environment. By combining different perspectives from the field of economic sociology, we demonstrate how competition on Chaturbate is shaped by various market devices whose strategic negotiation informs – and is informed by – the mora…
Digital spaces, material traces
This article argues that in order to cultivate a more thorough understanding of how gender, sexuality and embodiment come to ‘matter’ in digital environments, it is necessary to reconsider the notion of the virtual as it relates to everyday reality, in addition to rethinking the digital in relation to our common conception of materiality. To develop such an understanding, the discussion is organized around three sections. The first section addres…
Actually Existing Platformization
In this article we examine the partnership as a heterogeneous boundary resource that enables platforms to generate dependencies, become locally embedded, and gain power in urban settings. Pushing back against narratives of platform-driven disruption, which tend to universalize and totalize platform power, we discuss three cases of what we term "actually existing platformization"-a path-dependent and locally situated process in which platform comp…
The ties that bind
Although the body of research on social network sites (SNSs) continues to increase, scholarship in this relatively new field has largely neglected the gendered dimensions of networked interaction on SNSs. Through an empirical analysis of users’ comment exchanges, this study demonstrates how a group of interconnected ‘friends’ on MySpace engage in gendered and sexualized interactions through the use of various semiotic resources (i.e. text, images…
Assembling the Affective Field
This article recounts what happens when an increasingly commonplace technology such as the smartphone is mobilized in ethnographic fieldwork practice, investigating the particular research-related affects and intimacies that are produced by/in this sociotechnical assemblage. I start with a brief account of my research project, after which I discuss the ways in which my smartphone has informed and modulated the different components of my fieldwork…
The Neoliberal Subject of Value
In this essay, I introduce the figure of the “neoliberal subject of value” to explore the affective ambiguities of what Tiziana Terranova has termed “free labor,” or the voluntary, unwaged, and exploited activities that generate the digital data, content, and connections central to informational capitalism. If, as Terranova argues, free labor is characterized by exhaustion—due to the lack of means by which this labor can sustain itself—why are mi…
The Gentrification of Airbnb
In this article, we argue that it is analytically productive to think about the professionalization of hosting on Airbnb in terms of (commercial) gentrification. More precisely, we believe that rent gap theory is helpful to advance our understanding of why and how professionalized hosting has become an increasingly salient phenomenon and for centering the active role of Airbnb as a platform operator. We develop the notion of platform-scale rent g…
Writing from Experience
This article examines how weblog authors present their online gender identity, in order to establish how these modes of presentation fit into the research landscape about gender identity and computer-mediated communication (CMC). After a preliminary descriptive analysis of a sample of Dutch and Flemish weblogs, the authors conduct a qualitative content analysis of four of these `blogs'. They conclude that these weblog writers present their gender…
Architectures of 'the Good Life
This paper examines how the practices and events of queer collectivity might encourage us to think differently about the relationship between sexuality, intimacy, and citizenship. Through the exposition and discussion of four 'scenes' based on ethnographic engagements with various LGBT collectives in Baltimore, MD, it attends to the visceral and more-than-human registers in which a fragile sense of community comes into being, subsequently develop…
Migration, migrant work(ers) and the gig economy
Migration; gig economy; migrant workers; digital labour platforms; platform economy
The fabric of our memories
This article examines how the practices of self-preservation and other-directed care within Baltimore’s gay leather community are entangled with the material fabric of leather. I argue that leather forms a mnemonic technology that mediates between intimate experience and collective memory, thereby enabling leathermen to develop affective attachments to both the past and the future of their shared form of life. Ultimately, my aim is to attend to t…
A Body of Text
This article re-evaluates the relationship between gender identities, embodiment, sexuality and text-based, synchronous CMC (computer-mediated communication). A discourse analysis was conducted on two different IRC channels: #Cyberbar, a channel that hosts predominantly "straight" male/female gender performances; and #Queer, a channel mostly visited by participants who articulate "gay male" gender identities. The notion of embodiment played a piv…
Forces of Faith
This essay examines what it means for queer subjects to cultivate a concern for their lives and the lives of others in the face of debilitating circumstances, when these efforts are maintained through religious practices and attachments. Taking cues from a small yet growing strand of social science research that has investigated the role of religion and "spirituality" in queer people's everyday lives, I explore how the experience of a divine pres…
Writing from Experience
This article examines how weblog authors present their online gender identity, in order to establish how these modes of presentation fit into the research landscape about gender identity and computer-mediated communication (CMC). After a preliminary descriptive analysis of a sample of Dutch and Flemish weblogs, the authors conduct a qualitative content analysis of four of these `blogs'. They conclude that these weblog writers present their gender…
Web 2.0 and the transformation of news and journalism
A Body of Text
This article re-evaluates the relationship between gender identities, embodiment, sexuality and text-based, synchronous CMC (computer-mediated communication). A discourse analysis was conducted on two different IRC channels: #Cyberbar, a channel that hosts predominantly "straight" male/female gender performances; and #Queer, a channel mostly visited by participants who articulate "gay male" gender identities. The notion of embodiment played a piv…
The ties that bind
Although the body of research on social network sites (SNSs) continues to increase, scholarship in this relatively new field has largely neglected the gendered dimensions of networked interaction on SNSs. Through an empirical analysis of users’ comment exchanges, this study demonstrates how a group of interconnected ‘friends’ on MySpace engage in gendered and sexualized interactions through the use of various semiotic resources (i.e. text, images…
Digital spaces, material traces
This article argues that in order to cultivate a more thorough understanding of how gender, sexuality and embodiment come to ‘matter’ in digital environments, it is necessary to reconsider the notion of the virtual as it relates to everyday reality, in addition to rethinking the digital in relation to our common conception of materiality. To develop such an understanding, the discussion is organized around three sections. The first section addres…
Construction of the Khoja Zaynuddin Mosque
As part of an ongoing project at the World Heritage Site of Bukhara, we investigated the glue used in the construction of the Khoja Zaynuddin mosque. Analysis by a range of techniques confirmed that it consisted of a collagen-based glue. However, the glue contained many non-protein constituents. The presence of lipid material suggests that the glue was produced by a relatively unsophisticated process. More surprisingly, various marker compounds o…
Between hope and abandonment
This paper investigates how current transformations in HIV prevention in the USA are intensifying a logic of viral containment rooted in biomedicine and behavioural science, in order to curb the recent rise in new HIV infections, predominantly among young African-American 'men who have sex with men'. Based on fieldwork in Baltimore, I examine how this paradigm shift is translated into concrete prevention activities that focus on HIV testing and t…
Treatment is Prevention
The past 15 years have seen the waning of both cultural analysis and activism dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention, especially in relation to the enduring epidemic in the United States. However, current mutations in the American HIV prevention landscape, driven by the biomedical promise of a ‘Test and Treat’ strategy, are producing potentially destructive outcomes for vulnerable and dispossessed communities, a situation that demands renewed investmen…
Architectures of 'the Good Life
This paper examines how the practices and events of queer collectivity might encourage us to think differently about the relationship between sexuality, intimacy, and citizenship. Through the exposition and discussion of four 'scenes' based on ethnographic engagements with various LGBT collectives in Baltimore, MD, it attends to the visceral and more-than-human registers in which a fragile sense of community comes into being, subsequently develop…
Assembling the Affective Field
This article recounts what happens when an increasingly commonplace technology such as the smartphone is mobilized in ethnographic fieldwork practice, investigating the particular research-related affects and intimacies that are produced by/in this sociotechnical assemblage. I start with a brief account of my research project, after which I discuss the ways in which my smartphone has informed and modulated the different components of my fieldwork…
The Neoliberal Subject of Value
In this essay, I introduce the figure of the “neoliberal subject of value” to explore the affective ambiguities of what Tiziana Terranova has termed “free labor,” or the voluntary, unwaged, and exploited activities that generate the digital data, content, and connections central to informational capitalism. If, as Terranova argues, free labor is characterized by exhaustion—due to the lack of means by which this labor can sustain itself—why are mi…
The fabric of our memories
This article examines how the practices of self-preservation and other-directed care within Baltimore’s gay leather community are entangled with the material fabric of leather. I argue that leather forms a mnemonic technology that mediates between intimate experience and collective memory, thereby enabling leathermen to develop affective attachments to both the past and the future of their shared form of life. Ultimately, my aim is to attend to t…
Forces of Faith
This essay examines what it means for queer subjects to cultivate a concern for their lives and the lives of others in the face of debilitating circumstances, when these efforts are maintained through religious practices and attachments. Taking cues from a small yet growing strand of social science research that has investigated the role of religion and "spirituality" in queer people's everyday lives, I explore how the experience of a divine pres…
Platform labor
How does one value something one cannot and often does not want to see? How do contemporary digital platforms and their infrastructures of connectivity, evaluation, and surveillance affect this relationship between value and visibility, when it is mediated through the problem of labor as at once a commodity and a lived experience? And how can these infrastructures be mobilized in projects that aim to build different kinds of platforms - the kinds…
A good hustle
In this article, we examine how models working on Chaturbate, one of the world’s most popular adult webcam platforms, negotiate and make sense of the dynamic ways in which this platform configures their competitive environment. By combining different perspectives from the field of economic sociology, we demonstrate how competition on Chaturbate is shaped by various market devices whose strategic negotiation informs – and is informed by – the mora…
A new institution on the block
This article argues that Airbnb should be understood as a new urban institution that is transforming relations between market, state, and civil society actors. Taking the Airbnb Citizen advocacy initiative as my case, I examine how this transnational “home sharing” platform achieves such transformations, which in turn requires an investigation into the specific nature of Airbnb as an institutional form. Assuming the agenda-setting role of the urb…
Stepping Stone or Dead End
Platform Capitalism’s Hidden Abode
In this article, we argue that the governance of gig work under conditions of financialised platform capitalism is characterised by a process that we call “dual value production”: the monetary value produced by the service provided is augmented by the use and speculative value of the data produced before, during, and after service provision. App‐governed gig workers hence function as pivotal conduits in software systems that produce digital data …
At what price? Labour politics and calculative power struggles in on-demand food delivery
This article asks what can be gained by making calculability a pivotal demand for wage politics in gig economies characterised by dynamic fee structures. It examines how a small group of Berlin-based food delivery workers attempted to challenge Deliveroo's market power by building their own makeshift calculative equipment to help them 'reverse engineer' the company's fee pricing algorithm. It then documents the difficulties these 'riders' experie…
Civic Intimacies
This ethnographic book focuses on how Black queer people in Baltimore build support structures in the face of ongoing violence and insecurity in their lives. The author advances the concept of “civic intimacies” to account for a range of practices that enable Black queer Baltimoreans to not only survive but also thrive, as they employ strategies of care and belonging to navigate through civic institutions. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fie…
Actually Existing Platformization
In this article we examine the partnership as a heterogeneous boundary resource that enables platforms to generate dependencies, become locally embedded, and gain power in urban settings. Pushing back against narratives of platform-driven disruption, which tend to universalize and totalize platform power, we discuss three cases of what we term "actually existing platformization"-a path-dependent and locally situated process in which platform comp…
Odds stacked against workers
This article presents a cross-national comparative study examining how American and Chinese platform companies approach the gamification of on-demand food delivery. The study, based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Beijing, shows how couriers in these cities negotiate the gamified app-based systems designed to convince them to log in and keep working. We argue that such systems are not only a salient form of 'algorithmic management'…
Platform capitalism’s social contract
What kind of social contract underwrites platform capitalism? Based on findings from the Platform Labor research project, this essay argues that we are seeing the emergence of different gendered “platform fixes”
The Gentrification of Airbnb
In this article, we argue that it is analytically productive to think about the professionalization of hosting on Airbnb in terms of (commercial) gentrification. More precisely, we believe that rent gap theory is helpful to advance our understanding of why and how professionalized hosting has become an increasingly salient phenomenon and for centering the active role of Airbnb as a platform operator. We develop the notion of platform-scale rent g…
Migration and Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy
In urban gig economies around the world, platform labour is predominantly migrant labour, yet research on the intersection of the gig economy and labour migration remains scant. Our experience with two action research projects, spanning six cities on four continents, has taught us how platform work impacts the structural vulnerability of migrant workers. This leads us to two claims that should recalibrate the gig economy research agenda. First, w…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Sharing Economy and Platforms (14 works) · Business (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Economics (10 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (10 works)