Debangana Bose joined the Philomathia Social Sciences Programme at the University of Cambridge in July 2021. Her research to date focused on three broad critical themes lying at the intersection of Urban Geography, Labour Geography, and Development Studies: (1) geographies of urban displacement and exclusion; (2) the everyday politics of placemaking and emplacement among the urban ‘poor’ in peri-urban areas; and (3) digitalisation and the future of work and everyday life in small towns in India.

She conducted extensive field research in India. Her doctoral dissertation research focused on the first two critical themes and examined the lived experiences of displacement and the colliding practices of placemaking among displaced and resettled slum dwellers in Delhi’s periphery. Her research advances critical scholarship and debates on subaltern urbanisation, placemaking, survivability, and the right to the city. Her ongoing postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge funded by the Philomathia Foundation focuses on the third critical theme.

This research provides fresh insights into a question on the future of work with significant implications for research and policy worldwide: how do digital platformmediated service provisioning restructure employment relations, working conditions, and the workplace in small and ‘overlooked’ cities? Platform/gig work refers to short-term and temporary labour activities coordinated by digital platforms with no formal contracting between service providers and clients.

Her current research draws on a grounded analysis of gig workers’ lived experiences in three small cities in India – Dehradun, Darjeeling, and Shillong. This research has significant empirical, theoretical, and policy implications. Empirically and theoretically, this research will document the penetration of the platform economy in small towns in India and contribute to informing debates on the equalizing capacity of platform work that supposedly transcends spatial barriers. By acknowledging the voices of gig workers in overlooked cities in the global ‘South’, this research also has policy implications for rethinking what decent work really means in the context of longstanding unemployment and development crises in small and overlooked cities in the global ‘South’.