Deadline for abstracts: 30 January 2025. Submissions in English and Spanish.
Organizers: Miria Gambardella (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Griet De Lombaerde (University of Split), Abel Polese (Dublin City University), Jairo Baquero Melo (Universidad del Rosario)
With the present call, we are aiming to publish a special issue of a journal and an edited volume. Negotiations are still in course and we’ll announce our choice and plans in due course. This projects follows-up our previous collections “informality of crisis situations” published in Third World Quarterly and the trilogy “informality, labour mobility and precariousness: supplementing the state for the invisible and the vulnerable”, “Governance beyond the law: the immoral, the illegal, the criminal” and “the informal economy in global perspective: varieties of governance” (published by Palgrave Macmillan).
This is part of the EU-funded project PRESILIENT “Post-pandemic resilient communities: is the informal economy a reservoir for the next generation of digitalized and green businesses in the Global South?”
The Special Issue has been conceived with the two-folded goal of: 1) collect empirical evidence on the diversity of informal practices and uses of informality in the Latin American and Caribbean region; and 2) (based on the above evidence), taxonomize and theorize informality for the region and tease out the peculiarities and main features of studying informality in the region.
To do this, we welcome contributions that deal with a variety of forms of informality in the region, from everyday to political informality to urban governance, shadow economies, and precarious labour (and beyond, if you have further ideas, you are welcome to share them). For a starting discussion, you are welcome to refer to the open access article What is informality? (Mapping) “the art of bypassing the state” in Eurasian spaces – and beyond).
If interested, please send the following materials by 30 January 2025 to miria.gambardella@uab.cat and griet@efst.hr: Short abstract (maximum 100 words); Long abstract (maximum 300 words); Short biographical statement (maximum 150 words)
The main language of the SI is English but if we have enough papers we also plan a further publication in Spanish. Let us know if you’re interested.