This paper examines the socio-spatial dynamics of worker agency in the platform economy in the Washington, D.C. region. Drawing on the field of labor geography, we document the collective and inherently spatial conditions of laboring under and through new technologies for three years prior to, and six months after, a strike by Uber drivers in May 2019. In doing so, we explore what Uber’s platform means for the production, accumulation, and contestation of power. We argue that the big innovation of this platform is the creation of a “just-in-place” worker. Akin to those materials for assembly lines that arrived just-in-time for production, so too do drivers end up in just the right place for Uber’s services to be offered. We also argue that Uber’s attempts to keep its workers “just-in-place,” which generally isolate and disempower drivers, can actually enable new modes of organization. At a D.C. airport, drivers who were emplaced in a parking lot overcame one of the fundamental conditions of the Uber workplace: socio-spatial atomization. The airport became a space in which the “just-in-place” worker could, at least for a time, challenge such emplacement and exercise a form of collective worker agency by re-working Uber’s dynamic pricing system.

In 2017, Uber Technologies Inc. launched a new service called Uber Movement. Designed by a team of 10 engineers, the new service provided a select number of cities access to Uber’s vast trove of transportation data. One of the first cities to partner with Uber on this initiative was Washington, DC. Playing directly to the city’s longstanding “smart city” aspirations, the initiative was greeted warmly by city officials eager to market the region as a symbol of data-driven urban growth and smart technology. Largely missing from this response, however, was any mention of Uber drivers themselves. Over the course of the paper, and drawing on 40 interviews conducted with Washington, DC-based Uber drivers, we examine the labor conditions that we argue are central to the production of Uber’s smart data. Beyond placing labor more centrally in critiques of the smart city, the paper suggests that the experience of Uber drivers offers us a window into the type of smart city on offer. As we argue, the city that emerges from our interviews is less a city defined by data-driven growth, than it is a city defined by alienation and isolation.

In this commentary, we argue for the relevance and importance of postcolonial theory to the study of migration and mobility. Building on a panel discussion at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, we highlight a number of different ways in which this could take place. We suggest three possible interventions: stretching the boundaries of the spaces of the postcolonial; interrogating the spatial connections that are forged between disparate places through migration; and challenging singular or hierarchical notions of identity and/or place. In these ways, we conclude that postcolonial theory can complicate and enhance our understanding of migration, and that attention to migration research could, in turn, facilitate a 'social turn' for postcolonial geographies.

A key question for participatory archival research with Indigenous communities is how do non-Indigenous researchers engage a key colonial technology, the archive, to further decolonial goals? Due to their role in colonial processes that seek to control, silence, and erase Indigenous peoples, places, and ways of knowing, archives present limits for decolonising projects. Archives also, we suggest, offer possibilities for undermining colonial practices and institutions. The archive's authoritative pretensions to totality can, on occasion, be used against it. Engaging archives through decolonial practices, however, is not a straightforward process and we do not attempt to offer a programmatic statement. Instead, we raise a series of methodological, ethical, epistemological, and practical questions that arise from our sustained engagement with archives and Indigenous communities.As a legacy of The Indian Act 1876, First Nations individuals living on-reserve may receive social assistance from the federal government (Cullen et al., 2021). This study's broad impetus lies in the Federal Government's attempt to have social

Social assistance and related programs are an important part of life in the 13 Mi’kmaq communities of Nova Scotia. Given the substantive importance of social assistance and related programs in Mi’kmaq communities, it is surprising how little research has been conducted on the subject. This research aims to understand the origins of economic dependence and the related emergence of social assistance among the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia. We identify key historical periods and processes that have shaped the current policy landscape. A defining characteristic of social policy on reserve has been the fact that First Nations themselves have had very little say in how programs such as social assistance are designed and delivered. There is hope that a more self-determined and holistic approach may emerge.