Aspiration among precarity: Instagram and the emergence of the Personal Cleaners in Brazil and the Philippines

This work examines how social media, particularly Instagram, has reshaped the cleaning market in Brazil and the Philippines, giving rise to a new career path: the Personal Cleaner. Through online courses, domestic workers learn to use the platform as a sales tool, repositioning their professional identity and claiming dignity for their work. In this process, they present themselves as entrepreneurs, treating their profiles as “business headquarters”. Based on seven months of ethnographic research in Rio de Janeiro and five months in Metro Manila, his research examines how these entrepreneurial practices perpetuate a narrative of social mobility rooted in individual effort and competition, often accompanied by criticism of peers deemed unambitious (“poverty mindset”). This reorganisation of domestic work through social media implies changes in the political subjectivities of workers, who begin to operate in an environment driven by the attention economy and highly individualised, rejecting regulation and social protection. I argue that, while this reconfiguration opens new forms of agency, it also reveals a political shift that weakens collective aspirations and solidarity among domestic workers.

About the speaker:

Wagner Guilherme Alves da Silva is a Brazilian anthropologist working on labour, platforms and political radicalisation. He holds a PhD in Anthropology (National Museum/ Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and is currently undertaking a PhD in Geography at University College Dublin (UCD). Wagner is a researcher at the DeepLab (Digital Economy and Extreme Politics) and has extensive fieldwork experience in Brazil and the Philippines.