Christina Korkontzelou

Nasra, a young Tunisian woman, works remotely for the French-language department of a call center in Greece, representing a global electronics brand. As an extra-EU migrant, her residence permit and contract bind her to Greece and to the call center that sponsored her. Yet, from her bedroom in Athens, she virtually “travels” across France daily, assisting customers with home appliances. Starting from this ethnographic paradox, this project explores how various Greek and migrant workers in Greece’s rapidly-expanding call center industry, live their daily lives as globally mobile voices and data, while their bodies remain immobilized within national terrain and domestic spaces. It examines how these virtual and physical labour (im)mobilities take shape in the post-austerity Greek setting, involving various modes of EU and state governance, and an array of geographically-diffuse (re)productive spaces. These contradictions reproduce inequalities among digital workers performing similar tasks, while also generating practices of collective contestation and unionisation. Through a multi-sited fieldwork across households, employer-provided residencies, and union spaces across Greece, including a visit to Tunisia, the project aims to illuminate how digital capitalism, far from being placeless, lands through concrete bodies, places and borders, while revealing unexpected possibilities of solidarity across those same terrains.