Inside or Outside the Struggle?: Exploring Political Possibilities for Freelance Developers

Abstract

This thesis examines the everyday work time and work space experiences of freelance web and software developers and programmers. It asks how freelance experiences inform collective efforts to overcome the precariousness entailed in contract tech work. Ten developers participated in this qualitative study, completing two interviews each, while collectively providing 28 reflection entries on their ``ideal day" and eight photojournals documenting their daily work spaces. Combining ethnographic approaches with a precarity conceptual framework, this study found that freelancers' everyday behaviours offer insights into how, notwithstanding their apparent independence and autonomy, such workers engage with each other. Finding and using work spaces in Halifax, networking, and achieving an idealized ``9-to-5" work day are all strategies that may contain political possibilities for concerted efforts against precarious working conditions.