The IEL Collective researchers are collaborating in a new project, Ruptures21: Informality in COVID-19 Times. The collaboration responds to the challenges posed by old and current economic, social and legal dynamics and their impact on the human and non-human world. Through international interdisciplinary and institutional collaborations, it advances novel ways to understand and address global issues.

Ruptures21 call for a break with set approaches and new ways of acting and being.

Our first arena of study is on Informal Work and Public Health in Colombia: Targeted Regulation during the COVID-19 Global Emergency which will explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on informal workers in Colombia.

This project brings together a group of socio-legal scholars, labour economists, public health experts, anthropologists, cinematographers, infographers, web-designers and public policy makers in order to study the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on informal workers and their economies, using Colombia as its main case study.

Mixing media and blurring the boundaries between quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and between practice and the academy, outcomes of this project include multilingual policy briefings, life histories, documentaries, online outreach platforms and the first comprehensive data-base of aggregated data on informality in Colombia. Highlighting both the enormous yet often forgotten contribution of informal workers to the general economy of nations and the ultra-precarities they face in moments of public health crises, the outcomes of this project make an urgent call for a new set of new social, economic and health policies in Colombia and similar countries.

Informality in Covid-19 Times is supported by the University of Kent, the University of Essex, the University of Warwick and Rosario University and has been conducted in alliance with the Observatory for Women’s Equity (ICESI, Colombia), LaboUR, the Research Group on Public Health and Epidemiology (Rosario University) and AlianzaEFI.

The collaboration forms part of ongoing work by the IEL Collective to encourage public debate and policy innovation in relation to the role of the current international economic order. Supported by 12 institutions (including Warwick Law School, Essex Law School, Kent Law School and Rosario University), the IEL Collective has been responding to the COVID-19 pandemic with a series of open access interventions, articles and interviews.