REPAIR Dialogues with Olivia Maury
Olivia Maury will give an online presentation entitled Built-in Delay of the Architecture of Fulfilment: Perspectives from Migrant Platform Workers in Helsinki on November 19 at 9:00-10:00.
Join us using this link: https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/64390246042?pwd=zubMhVJ7TqwctwFH4qbMZAOR8E87bj.1
REPAIR Dialogues is an informal online series where researchers and collaborators from the REPAIR project share their ongoing work, ideas, and findings. Each session features a short presentation followed by an open discussion. All are welcome!
Presentation of the day
The ‘technology company’ Wolt promotes itself as being a ‘digital world version of the shopping malls’, which means ‘essentially – building new infrastructure’ to make cities ‘better places to live. ‘By “better” we mean happier people’, the authors of the Wolt webpage claim (Wolt 2025). Such visions of the ‘fulfilment city’ (Attoh et al. 2024) unfold in relation to a capacity to obscure human labour as well as the frictions, struggles and tensions that arise along the production process.
Drawing on fieldwork with migrant platform-delivery workers in Helsinki, this presentation examines what materially and temporally inhabiting the fulfilment city entails and theorises how tech capital’s promises of immediate fulfilment rest on temporal delay. In their quest to seize control over future trajectories, tech companies often adopt the mantra of 'fake it until you make it’, concealing failures in order to portray technological development as a linear, deterministic, and progressive process (Sadowski 2025). For migrant platform-delivery workers, delay translates into waiting, whether in the form of waiting for a residence permit, or food delivery workers’ ‘work of waiting’ spent logged onto digital platforms in the hope of securing lucrative gigs, and by their waiting realizing the promise of immediate fulfilment. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the air of the architecture of fulfilment is not simply a material-technological circumstance. Rather, it appears as a political architecture with specific temporal dimensions, shaped in the conflictual spaces of law, the tech-finance nexus and living labour.
Olivia Maury is a University Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. Maury's research stretches across the fields of critical migration studies, socio-legal studies and the sociology of work. Her work is motivated by the desire to understand how social life is shaped by the digitisation of society, particularly in relation to labour-migration, automated border control and migrants’ power to improve their life conditions. Moreover, her work critically examines borders and migratory movements in relation to capitalist value accumulation.