Paper Number
ECIS2026-1152
Paper Type
CRP
Abstract
Digital platforms increasingly promise inclusion for displaced populations, but most initiatives overlook the informal systems through which refugees sustain digital livelihoods. Existing research concentrates on platform access and skills acquisition while neglecting the hidden infrastructures of collaboration, care, and improvisation that enable continuity in unstable conditions. To close this gap, this study explores how displaced persons engage in informal digital labour and construct social and financial resilience through collective practices. A qualitative interpretive approach uncovers how digital participation emerges through shared repair, relational trust, and mutual endurance rather than institutional design. Findings uncover that displaced workers re-engineer visibility, legitimacy, and payment through improvised arrangements that blend digital and social economies. The analysis reframes resilience as a collective and affective practice grounded in human interdependence, offering new directions for designing inclusive digital ecosystems that recognize informality as an infrastructural strength and a generative site of innovation and adaptation.
Recommended Citation
Kuika Watat, Josue; Zada, Ashna Mahmood; and Jonathan, Gideon Mekonnen, "Between Platforms And Precarity: The Hidden Economies Of Refugee Digital Labour" (2026). ECIS 2026 Proceedings. 3.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2026/is_resil/isresilience/3
Between Platforms And Precarity: The Hidden Economies Of Refugee Digital Labour
Digital platforms increasingly promise inclusion for displaced populations, but most initiatives overlook the informal systems through which refugees sustain digital livelihoods. Existing research concentrates on platform access and skills acquisition while neglecting the hidden infrastructures of collaboration, care, and improvisation that enable continuity in unstable conditions. To close this gap, this study explores how displaced persons engage in informal digital labour and construct social and financial resilience through collective practices. A qualitative interpretive approach uncovers how digital participation emerges through shared repair, relational trust, and mutual endurance rather than institutional design. Findings uncover that displaced workers re-engineer visibility, legitimacy, and payment through improvised arrangements that blend digital and social economies. The analysis reframes resilience as a collective and affective practice grounded in human interdependence, offering new directions for designing inclusive digital ecosystems that recognize informality as an infrastructural strength and a generative site of innovation and adaptation.