The second session of the seminar “Around the world”, co-organized in the framework of the working group “Mobilities and Spaces” of Labex Dynamite by Nadine Cattan, Clarisse Didelon, Brenda Le Bigot and Anne-Cécile Ott will take place
Feb. 25, 2022 – 14h-17h
Campus Condorcet, room 0.032 (presentation of the health pass)
and in videoconference (to get the zoom link and the identifiers, please contact : brenda.le.bigot ( at ) univ-poitiers.fr)
Digital nomads: ubiquity, work and leisure
This session questions the relationship to distance that is built in the context of lifestyles largely based on a quest for ubiquity: the mobilities of digital nomads. “Distance is an illusion” announces one of the guides proposed to this group of travelers-workers.
“Understanding the interplay between freedom, privilege and precarity: digital nomads’ geoarbitrage as a neoliberal and postcolonial practice”
par Fabiola Mancinelli, Associate professor, Département d’Anthropologie sociale, Université de Barcelone
Abstract
Popular entrepreneurial literature praises the rise of digital nomads (DN) as a lifestyle of freedom, providing the flexibility to reconcile productivity with leisure travel. This talk aims to contextualise the freedom narrative within a broader picture by exploring how structural constraints influence digital nomads’ freedom.
I ask whether digital nomads’ choice to relocate continually can be considered a creative, albeit opportunistic, way to navigate the increasing labour precarity and the fading social welfare protections of developed countries.
Based on ethnographic evidence on DNs’ mobility strategies, this intervention pays attention to the structural forces and mobility regimes that constrain and facilitate their movement, highlighting the relevance of geographic arbitrage as a way to take advantage of an income generated in higher-cost countries by scaling down day-to-day-expenses in countries with reduced costs of living.
The analysis will specifically consider the contingent articulations between neoliberalism and postcoloniality and how they shape the imaginings and pursuits of DNs’ lifestyle and destination choices.
“The little world of digital nomads: coworking spaces as a globalized “entre-soi”
by Claire Mahéo, Associate professor in information and communication sciences, University of Southern Brittany, Julie Pasquer, Associate professorin information and communication sciences, University of Southern Brittany, Florence Gourlay, Associate professor in geography, University of Southern Brittany
Abstract
Digital nomads cultivate a singular link to the territory. Their professional activities allow them to free themselves a priori from the constraint of a productive territorial assignment. Many of them frequent “quarter-places” (coworking spaces) because their a-territoriality allows them to adopt, punctually or durably, a way of life that hybridizes the “vacation” dimension with those of work and home.
Moreover, the geographical distribution of these quarter-places reveals a certain use of the world. Based on digital disintermediation and offered to mobile workers, how do these places question a form of re-territorialization? They can be found in territories that are relatively far from metropolises, often benefiting from tourist attractions.
With little or no involvement in local territorial dynamics, these quarter-places generate the emergence of new practices, but they are not exempt from a certain form of instrumentalization of territories on the part of the managers of these places and their digital nomad users.
These places thus present diverse situations of territorial intermediation and yet display a standardization (standardized equipment and services, participative functioning and values). They thus internalize international and globalized logics, notably through their dependence on the digital and cultural communities of the DN.
The sharing of common values or interests between these people is not only the condition of their existence, but also the first element of distinction between them; and the exoticization of the world their theater.
