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*CALL FOR PAPERS*

*URBAN ETHNOGRAPHIES OF COMMONING//*

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*Panel organized for American Anthropological Association Annual 
Conference, *Washington, DC, November 29 - December 3,2017.**

This panel aims to bring into conversation ethnographic case studies on 
forms of urban living created through acts of commoning –spaces imagined 
and lived as urban commons, belonging to no one and everyone.

We aim 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. We would like to explore everyday 
cultures of commoning that rely on alternative socio-spatial relations. 
It is our aim to take a close look at urban inhabitants’ quotidian 
practices, be they work, reproductive labor, or leisure and festivity, 
that make our spaces in common despite (and in the midst of) capitalist 
social relationships.

Everyday acts of commoning materialize within the cracks of the 
capitalist system and potentially create new life-forms. We treasure 
such 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 everyday lives, 
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.

We would like to highlight both achievements and drawbacks. We dwell on 
the emancipatory potentials of commoning 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 panel aims to discuss these questions by bringing together 
ethnographic case studies from different urban contexts, to discuss 
alternative forms of production, consumption, exchange, and sociality, 
all relying on practices of commoning as their major resource.

We are calling for empirically informed 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 250 words) and bios (of 200 words) by April 
3rd^to Derya Özkan ([log in to unmask] 
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) and Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç 
([log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>).//

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