Just a reminder that the deadline for our CFC is Monday, May 1st, 2017.
*---*
*CALL FOR CHAPTERS*
*COMMONING THE CITY*
*COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES FROM ISTANBUL AND BEYOND*
*Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç & Derya Özkan (eds.)*
This edited volume has its roots in *Spaces in Common*, a seminar series
realized in Istanbul in the Spring of 2016, where a group of academics and
activists were invited to think together about forms of urban living
created through acts of commoning –spaces imagined and lived as urban
commons, belonging to no one and everyone.
The proposed collection of papers similarly aims to reflect upon urban
inhabitants’ commoning practices that produce and reproduce life in the
city for the sake of cultivating a new ethos to sustain livelihoods and
affirm communal instincts beyond motivations of profit, competition, and
wealth spared for individual well-being at the expense of others. These
practices develop a culture of commoning that helps imagine a city marked
by alternative socio-spatial relations and practices. Such imagery is
possible only with active and creative urban inhabitants immersed in
cultures of commoning through their quotidian practices, be they work,
reproductive labor, or leisure and festivity. It is these practices that
make our spaces in common despite (and in the midst of) capitalist social
relationships. We embrace the concept of urban commons as it allows us to
think beyond the public-private and state-market dichotomies that are the
building blocks of capitalist social formations.
Urban space is constantly subject to enclosure for capitalist profit. As a
generative force for accumulation, enclosure entails dispossession in
various forms: expropriation, evacuation, denying public access to a once
common space, commodification of culture, etcetera. The dystopic conditions
of neoliberal urbanism underlying these processes have until now received
due scholarly attention. What equally deserves consideration, and yet has
been less debated and undertheorized, is the very acts of commoning that
escape the capitalist logic, materialize within the cracks of the
capitalist system and potentially create new life-forms. This volume wants
to highlight such commoning practices that are affirmative of the
possibility of an urban life beyond capitalist social relationships.
We treasure practices of commoning, for they not only reveal urban
inhabitants’ capacity to make the city but they also imply a radical will
to remake ourselves and our lives by way of reorganizing our living spaces,
redefining forms of production and labor, developing new means of
livelihood, and in turn reminding us every day that we all inhabit a common
life-world.
In this edited volume, we explore the extent to which urban life forms
created through commoning challenge capitalist social relationships. We
highlight both achievements and drawbacks. We dwell on the emancipatory
potentials of these practices, as well as the incomplete or conflicting
processes and incompatibilities they inhabit. We focus on cases of urban
commoning while keeping an eye on their continuous enclosures. What are
some of the ways in which we can imagine and sustain our ongoing everyday
lives as a locus of commoning? What kinds of sensibilities and perspectives
(for instance a feminist perspective) can we incorporate into our
understanding of urban commons?
This volume aims to discuss these questions by bringing together case
studies in different urban contexts and theoretical perspectives on
emergent forms of production, consumption, exchange, and sociality, all
relying on practices of commoning as their major resource.
We are calling for empirically informed and/or theoretical papers that
offer refreshing perspectives on the following:
* Precarity and resistance
* Solidarity economies
* Commoning arts & culture in the city
* Commoning and law
* Commoning and affective labor in the city
* Experiences of commoning urban property
* Sustainable urban life
Please send abstracts (of 500 words) by May 1st to Derya Özkan (
[log in to unmask]) and Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç ([log in to unmask]
).
--
*Guldem Baykal Buyuksarac*
Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology
Departmental Erasmus Coordinator
Istanbul University / Faculty of Letters
Department of Anthropology
Ordu Cad. No. 196 Beyazit 34459 Istanbul
+90 212 440 0000 (15966)
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
skype: guldembaykal
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