Making space for work: understanding freelancers’ hybrid work identities through work from home practices

Through narratives of media freelancers in Toronto, Canada, this paper examines how hybrid work identities are revealed through work from home practices. For freelancers, work identities often shift between employer and employee; self-employment requires that an individual attends to both what is best for the business and what is best for the worker. This hybrid identity is naturalized in freelancing, and often hard to talk about, but it emerges through spatial strategies of working from home. We identify three scales: moving house to give more space to work or allow work to happen at home; reconfiguring home/work space, to prioritize space for work or to ensure it is comfortable and aesthetically pleasing; third, inhabiting home/work space to shift to ‘work mode’ through bodily practice. Our data consists of two sets of interviews, the first from before the start of the pandemic (conducted from December 2019 to March 2020) and the second set during the pandemic (conducted from September to December 2021). By examining the spatial strategies that freelancers enact to make work possible, we open up a way to talk about work identity, offering insights on broader back to the office debates and the changing work identities of all those able to work from home.