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Seminars and Conferences

ISEG Research Seminars '25 | Inês Faria

09 Apr 2025 from 13:00 to 14:00
ISEG, Lecture Theatre 3 (Quelhas)

The 9 April (Wednesday), between 13.00 to 14.00, ISEG ISEG's Lecture Theatre 3 (Quelhas, Floor 4) will host a new session of the 2nd Semester of the ISEG Research Seminars.

The keynote speaker of the seminar will be Inês Faria, researcher at ISEG, who will present a paper on "Gender and Labour in Informal Economies: Digital Disasters in Mozambique, the abstract for which can be found below.

The 2nd Semester Research Seminars will be held weekly up until 4 June and will feature members of ISEG's faculty, as well as from other Portuguese and international universities. Further information HERE.

Free admission.

Informal retail economies are prevalent at the global level and link specific supply chains to particular - material and digital - valuation processes. They occupy spaces between livelihoods, normative societal and legal frameworks and everyday life pragmatics. The local importance of informal economies differs globally and situationally, but in low-income settings they can represent about 90% of all entrepreneurial activities. Such informal livelihoods are deeply entangled with sociocultural configurations, including policy and regulatory frameworks of specific jurisdictions, and mundane elements of people's everyday lives. Based on ethnographic research in Maputo, Mozambique, in this article, I explore a particular case of informal economic activity - women-led digital disasters (used clothing) markets on WhatsApp and Instagram, which are enabled by traveling technologies - mobile money and social media - and traveling disposable commodities - used clothes. I approach this as a form of digital entrepreneurship: a practice incentivised by different institutional actors promoting financial inclusion and market making as pathways for sustainable development. Implying a process of economic and semiotic (re)valuation that crosscuts both global circulation of objects and commodities, the businesses explored in this paper shed light into grounded aspects of labour, gender, class and household management dynamics embedded in the creation of digital markets. Sharing the story of Frederica, one of my research interlocutors, as an example, I argue that narratives incentivising digital financial inclusion and entrepreneurship as a means to achieve gender empowerment and development have serious limitations: the increasing developmental focus on financial inclusion, technology and entrepreneurship seems to be lacking a solid foundation - focusing only on this dimension leaves other media of challenging inequalities, institutional insufficiencies, bureaucratic complexities and unequal power structures untouched.