Dr Sofia Negri

Profile

I am a Lecturer in Development Geography at Queen Mary University of London. My work is driven by a commitment to defending and advancing labour rights, combining academic research with activist practice.

My PhD thesis, Working and organising flexibly through digital-urban spaces: the spatial and political composition of delivery platform workers in Argentina (QMUL, 2025), examined how platform workers mobilise collectively across digital and urban spaces, focusing on the ways their struggles challenge dominant models of work and open possibilities for alternative futures.

My research foregrounds collaborative methodologies — particularly workers’ inquiry — developed with unions and grassroots organisations in Latin America. By centring migrant and women workers’ experiences, I bring feminist and intersectional perspectives to debates on platform labour and the future of work. Beyond academia, I have engaged directly in political debates, including presenting at policy forums and co-authoring with union leaders at international conferences.

Teaching

I approach teaching as an opportunity to create a space where students feel they can question, debate, and think differently. I enjoy bringing political and social issues into the classroom and working through them together, connecting theory with the world outside the university.

I am currently contributing to the following undergraduate and postgraduate modules:

• GEG515 Development Geographies: From International to Global Perspectives
• GEG7137 Re-theorizing Global Development
• GEG4015 - Sustainable Transitions

Research

Research Interests:

My research examines how delivery platform workers in Latin America organise through digital-urban spaces. Through militant methodologies, I analyse how digital infrastructures, urban spaces, and political subjectivities intersect in workers’ struggles.

Key contributions of my work include:

• Platforms’ infrastructural arrangements and solidarity: showing how spatio-temporal labour structures shape workers’ bonds, and how unions develop creative strategies like Solidarity Stops to sustain geographically dispersed organising.
• Multiscale organising strategies: tracing how workers link local and transnational struggles, from demanding algorithm transparency to securing migrants’ rights at national level and contesting platforms’ global policies.
• Reframing the future of work: challenging dominant framings of platform labour as entrepreneurial freedom while also centring workers’ demands for autonomy over their labour time as the basis for alternative rights and postwork imaginaries.

I am interested in thinking about autonomy as a labour right, investigating how workers’ struggles can inspire radical transformations in labour regulation and future-of-work debates.

Publications

Negri, S. (2025, July). “Freedom as Autonomy: platform workers’ struggles and the future of work in Argentina.” CLaSP Blog. https://www.claspblog.org/blogposts/acu41f0n0o45jegpfhnn1u7kp8uqz6

Negri, S. D. (Translator) of Svampa, M. (2025). “Socioecological crises and transitions” in Halvorsen, S (Ed.). Latin American Geographies. London: Routledge.

Negri, S. D. (2025). “Data labor and collective mobilization”  in Venturini, Tommaso; Acker, Amelia; Plantin, Jean-Christophe & Walford, Tone. The Sage Handbook of Data and Society. London: Sage.

Atzeni, M., Gutiérrez, F., Elbert, R., Pérez, P. & Negri, S. "Relaciones laborales, proceso de trabajo y protesta obrera en la economía de plataformas. El caso del delivery en Argentina y Chile" (2024). In Stecher, A. y Morales, K. (Eds), Trabajo y capitalismo de plataformas en América Latina: Modelo productivo, regulaciones laborales, subjetividades y organización colectiva de trabajadores. Chile: LOM Ediciones. 

Elbert, R. & Negri, S. (2023). "Digital resistance to algorithmic exploitation: Twitter activism of Argentine delivery platform workers during the Covid  19 pandemic." In Anita Hammer and Immanuel Ness (Eds.) Global Rupture. Neoliberal Capitalism and the Rise of Informal Labour in the Global South. London: Brill. https://brill.com/display/title/59846

Negri, S. (2021). “The Labour Process and the Emergence of Workers’ Mobilisation in Delivery Platforms in Argentina. A Mixed Methods Study”. New Sociological Perspectives, 1(1).

Elbert, R. & Negri, S. (2021). “Delivery platform workers during COVID-19 pandemic in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina): deepened precarity and workers’ response in a context of epidemiological crisis”, Journal of Labour and Society (ISSN: 2471-4607). 

Public Engagement

I try to make my research useful beyond academia by collaborating with workers’ organisations and unions, and by intervening in public debates on labour and the future of work. Alongside academic publications, I publish in both Spanish and English for outlets such as Panama Revista, Jacobin Latinoamérica, Cenital, and El Economista. I am also involved in activist and feminist networks that create spaces for collective learning and political exchange.