This article examines the platformization of care and domestic work in Spain as part of the broader crisis of familistic welfare regimes in southern Europe. It argues that digital platforms do not represent a rupture with existing care arrangements, but rather an intensification and reorganization of long-standing patterns of privatization, marketization and reliance on migrant labour. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with platform-mediated care and domestic workers in Madrid, combined with collaborative ethnography with migrant workers' collectives, the article situates platform expansion within the structural under-provision of public care services and the transnational reorganization of reproductive labour. Empirically, the analysis shows that platform-mediated care work in Spain is closely embedded in stepwise migratory itineraries shaped by legal insecurity, administrative borders and uneven access to rights. Platforms leverage the temporalities of the migratory process, often operating as gateways into employment while simultaneously generating specific forms of stratification structured by gendered, racialized and legal inequalities. At the same time, the article highlights that in the Spanish context, platformization unfolds in a context marked by pre-existing traditions of collective organizing among migrant domestic and care workers. Grassroots collectives function as alternative infrastructures of social reproduction, providing mutual aid, legal advice and spaces for the politicization of shared experiences. This allows individualized platform-based trajectories to be rearticulated into collective forms of agency and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting that future research should further explore the conditions under which platform-induced isolation can be transformed into collective organization and how legal status, welfare regimes and local organizing infrastructures shape divergent outcomes of platformization in care work.
Against the backdrop of the closing Interreg VI period, this paper examines the implementation patterns of the European Territorial Cooperation in the Alpine region. Using near-complete Interreg V (2014–2020) data, we analyze thematic foci, budgets, and spatial dimension across Interreg A programs and the Interreg B Alpine Space Programme. Our findings reveal a “soft” thematic orientation: Interreg A prioritizes projects in tourism, culture, and health and social services, while Interreg B targets more structural fields such as spatial planning and transport and mobility. Three drivers explain these patterns: (a) the spatial structure of the involved territories (e.g., urban corridors, tourism flows, and freight axes), (b) path dependencies and institutionalization, and (c) territorial diversity requiring place-based strategies. Furthermore, cooperation hotspots are concentrated in highly urbanized border regions (e.g., Geneva, Basel, Brenner, Lake Constance). Policy implications for 2028+ include safeguarding continuity, strengthening regional assets, and orienting cooperation towards resilience and strategic objectives while retaining the benefits of soft instruments.
This article approaches the alternative protein transition by noting with the EAT-Lancet Commission that the existing world-food-system is a main driver of global warming. Building on eco-feminist and eco-Marxist critiques of the world-food-system, the article notes how this system organizes not only agriculture, animal husbandry, logistics, diets, and markets across the planet, but also profoundly unjust social relationships. As the article observes, this state of affairs has been mapped by sociology and environmental history, but it is also a central concern to science fiction and climate fiction. The article adds to work on such texts by analysing Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049, a dystopian film that envisions a socially stratified future where the long history of extractive capitalism has led to the death of most non-human life. Thus, protein and other essential nutrients must be manufactured in vitro, and a shortage of labour has given birth to a new type of human life also grown in laboratories. The article argues that the film explores the border that separates artificially produced protein from conventional types and, in doing so, maps the worlds that may ensue if the transition to new types of protein is made to serve the same system as that which created the existing world-food-system. The article argues that the film comments on the alternative protein transition by depicting a future where this transition has served the needs of the capitalist world-food-system rather than the Earth system, but also by envisioning protein futures beyond the extractive violence that is destroying land and people in the present.
Platform work is predominantly framed as an urban phenomenon, a presumption that we challenge in this paper. We scraped data from online childcare platforms operating in Switzerland to assess the scale and geographies of platform work. Our paper contributes to the debate on the ambivalent effects of visibilising platform workers in feminised labour market segments. It provides a critical reflection on the potential and limitations of scraping platform data as a critical/feminist method of counter-mapping platformisation. While much remains opaque, our scraping discloses a highly concentrated market dominated by one platform and a surplus workforce, with far more worker than customer profiles. Our roughly 58 000 analysed worker profiles give no indication of platformisation reducing the feminisation of childcare work. However, we find that childcare platforms are not primarily an urban phenomenon: our data disclose only a very weak correlation between population density and prevalence of worker profiles. Thus, we argue that the debate on platformisation needs to reflect the implications of its urban bias.
This paper examines far-right policy proposals, ideological positions, and protest strategies around housing to explore how a now well-established far right across Europe may convert its electoral successes into policy platforms which reflect ethno-national agendas and which, crucially, might break with received affinities between the populist right and neoliberalism. To this end we consider two forms of engagement with the housing question on the far right. First, we chart emergent discourses in branches of Germany's AfD party on housing policy, focusing particularly on a new identitarian critique of free-market housing policies among the younger, more intellectually oriented wing of the party and its wider ideological orbit. These arguments position housing as a key responsibility of a nationally conscious state, and as a means to promote rooted forms of German family life within a “social–national” framework. In the UK context, by contrast, we examine how housing becomes an arena for nativist claims around national belonging and deservingness of social support through a study of far-right mobilisation against so-called “asylum hotels” through the summer of 2025. Here, racialised social media and press reporting, as well as a policy landscape which works through outsourcing and privatisation to drive asylum seekers and refugees to the margins of public life, reveals a paradoxical situation where the demands of the far right have already effectively been realised by a bipartisan commitment among successive governments to keep asylum seekers precariously housed and limit their access to the housing market. While the German case reveals a far right more advanced in its consideration of the role of housing in an ethno-nationalist programme, compared to a loosely-organised UK far right mobilising sporadically (but intensively) around the contradictions of privatised housing policy, both cases reveal how housing operates as a site of increasing right-wing claim-making about national identity, as well as one of material exclusions. With an eye to the internal dynamics among these far-right formations, and the way these materialise spatially, we consider how these two formations may interact in the future, before discussing how these developments may be resisted.
