Lecture | LUCIS What's New?! Series
Driving Gigs in Oman: Women and Techno-Fixes in the Platform Economy
- Crystal Ennis
- Date
- Thursday 1 May 2025
- Time
- Serie
- What's New?! Spring Lecture Series 2025
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.30
Digital platforms mediating work between customers and service providers have expanded exponentially in the past decade, driving a growing research agenda on the impact of platform capitalism, AI, and the gig economy on labour around the world. This lecture builds an understanding the platform economy at the intersection of gender with the political economy of labour. Focusing on the Omani case of a new women’s taxi service (OFemale) through the digital platform OTaxi, it asks how ride-hailing platforms are impacting women’s employment futures in the Middle East. Using rapid ethnography, elite interviews and a survey, the research examines both the launch and expansion of the business alongside the experiences of Omani women as taxi drivers. The talk will excavate three gendered discourses of freedom, protection and job creation around platform labour and female labour market participation in the region. It argues that digital platforms such as OTaxi offer techno-fixes to fill gaps in the market and respond to the need to generate job opportunities for women. At the same time, women make use of these opportunities and interpret their experience in diverse ways that problematise the neo-liberal promises of innovative technologies, job flexibility, and autonomy embodied in platform capitalism.
About the speaker
Crystal A. Ennis teaches Global Political Economy and International Relations at Leiden University. She currently serves as associate editor of the International Studies Review and president of the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies. Crystal is author of Millennial Dreams in Oil Economies: Jobs Seeking and the Global Political Economy of Labour in Oman (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and co-editor of The South Asia to Gulf Migration Governance Complex (Bristol University Press 2022). Her publications have also appeared in New Political Economy, Global Labour Journal, the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Third World Quarterly, among others.
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