Funded through seed grants from the University of Amsterdam’s Fair and Resilient Society initiative and the Centre for Urban Studies, Rivke Jaffe, Carolina Frossard, and Jelke Bosma have been conducting a pilot study titled “The Digitalization of Illicit Economies”. This project, led in collaboration with Bruno Cardoso from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, aims to understand how uneven urban landscapes of risk transform as drug dealing increasingly incorporates digital technologies. It focuses on micro-transactions in illicit drugs in Amsterdam and Rio de Janeiro. Are drugs sales starting to resemble other forms of ultrafast delivery, with spatially distributed app-based deliveries replacing street dealers? How do drug dealers, consumers and other residents experience risk as mobile deliveries replace place-based sales?

The research team has been studying such digitally mediated spatial shifts and how they connect to differentiated exposure to harm across urban spaces and populations.

Given the project’s interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scope, the IAS is hosting two network meetings around this research. A first meeting, held on December 1, will concentrate on the project’s interdisciplinary and international dimension, connecting researchers across geography, media studies, STS, economics and public health to draw out comparisons across cities and between legal and illegal digitalized economic activities. The second meeting, held on December 13, will explore the potential societal impact of the preliminary research findings, connecting with societal stakeholders working in NGOs and government agencies focused on harm reduction.

This is an invitational event.