Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with hackney carriage/black cab and Uber drivers in the North East of England, this paper investigates the relationship between the rise of digital platforms like Uber and the emergence of new geographies of racialised difference, which exceed white/non-white and conventional racial-ethnic lines. It first examines ethnographic accounts of diverse forms of racialisation historically faced by the ‘old’ minoritised group of Newcastle-born British Asian taxicab drivers, bringing forth the ways in which their affective impact continues to endure and be reckoned with. Following this, it traces how these extant forms of racialisation recombine with economic competition linked to the rise of platforms to become recast and redirected towards first-generation migrant platform workers today. Empirically locating this process in everyday moments of encounter, it demonstrates, and underlines, the co-constitutive relationship between racial differentiation and the techno-capitalist regime of platform capitalism, as well as the urban condition of platform urbanism. In dissecting this, it mobilises an interdisciplinary theoretical lens which develops a materialist conceptualisation of race in relation to the racial capitalism literature and figurational sociology, arguing that a focus on affective experiences must be situated in the longue durée of processes of racialisation.
Salman Khan (Mon,) studied this question.