On Wednesday January 7, 2026, NOG member Guanqin He will defend her PhD dissertation “Blooming in the Cracks: Women Migrant Workers and their Everyday Practices in the China’s Plaform-mediated Gig Economy.”
In her dissertation, Guanqin He uncovers the less visible and often undervalued lived experiences of women migrant workers in China’s platform-mediated gig economy. She challenges the idea that gig work is a complete break from the past, instead situating it within the long history of China’s informal economy. By reconstructing the Western concept of the “platform” into the Chinese notion of pingtai, Guanqin reveals a hybrid governance mechanism where corporate power, state objectives, and vernacular culture intersect to shape labor conditions.
According to Guanqin, adopting an intersectional, bottom-up, and practice-based perspective is essential to understanding these dynamics. Moving beyond a “single-gig paradigm,” Guanqin employs a feminist digital ethnography to examine the comprehensive life courses of migrant workers. This approach demonstrates how gender, class, and migration status co-shape women migrants’ aspirations and precarity. By focusing on their everyday practices, this dissertation brings a necessary people-centric focus to the intersection of platform studies, gender studies, and migration studies.
In particular, Guanqin demonstrates how these dynamics play out across three distinct sectors: domestic work, food delivery, and AI data annotation. She introduces the concept of “platform patriarchy” in food delivery to explain how infrastructural exclusion marginalizes women, and “ambiguity as governance” in rural AI work to describe how opacity shifts risk onto workers. Yet, the dissertation also highlights resilience; it shows how domestic workers use relational networks to resist control and reframes hidden data tasks as essential care work that sustains AI systems.
Details PhD Defense
Date: Wednesday, January 7, 2026
Time: 16:15-17:15h.
Location: Hybrid. Live: Academiegebouw, Domplein 29 in Utrecht.
Title: Blooming in the Cracks: Women Migrant Workers and their Everyday Practices in the China’s Plaform-mediated Gig Economy.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi, Dr. Koen Leurs & Prof. Dr. Saskia Witteborn
Image of the tile tableau with a procession of workers, designed by Albert Termote (1887-1978) from 1940, above the entrance to the building at Oudenoord 340 (former Roman Catholic House of Labour) in Utrecht. Photograph D.G. Goosen, Creative Commons.
7 January 2026, 9.30-13.00h, Utrecht University, Kanunnikenzaal, Academy building
Organizers: Dr. Koen Leurs & Professor Sandra Ponzanesi, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University
Symposium aims: Beyond Platform Labor brings together an international group of scholars who push platform-work debates beyond techno-centric narratives by foregrounding the lived experiences, forms of agency, and vulnerabilities of workers embedded in digital economies. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, critical media, platform and data perspectives, the symposium interrogates how gender, migration, race, sexuality, and inequalities shape both visible and hidden forms of labor underpinning contemporary digital infrastructures. Speakers aim to reorient discussions of digital labor by centering how workers navigate, resist, enact care and reshape platform-mediated conditions.
Program details:
Opening – 9.30
Panel 1 – 9.45-11.15h
- Guanqin He, MSc – Utrecht University – Blooming in the Cracks: Women Migrant Workers and their Everyday Practices in China’s Platform-mediated Gig Economy
- Manaar Mohammed, MSc – Erasmus University Rotterdam – Algorithmic Inequality (AI): The extraction of African knowledge-labour in building AI infrastructures.
- Dr. Minke Hajer, Utrecht University, – Delivering Masculinity: Irregular Migrant Men Navigating Precarious Platform Work
- Dr. Rébecca Franco, Utrecht University – The Domestic and Sex Work of Migrant Women on Digital Platforms
Panel 2 – 11.30-13.00h
- Prof. Nishant Shah – Chinese University of Hong Kong – Everyday Digital Care: Reorienting digital care infrastructures
- Dr. Laura Candidatu – Utrecht University – The European division of labor in the digital economy. A materialist feminist perspective
- Prof. Saskia Witteborn – Chinese University of Hong Kong – Web3, Migration, and Platform Labor
- Prof. Claartje ter Hoeven – Utrecht University – Making AI Work: The Human Labor Behind-the-Scenes
The symposium precedes the PhD defense of Guanqin He, happing on 7 January 2026 at 16.15h, at the Academy building, Utrecht University
For registration and additional information, email Koen Leurs at k.h.a.leurs@uu.nl
