Call for Papers: Neglected Landscapes of Work and Everyday Life in Cities*

Session conveyors: Ceyda Sungur; Dr Eda Beyazit Ince (Istanbul Technical University, Turkey)

The secretion of urban space lies in the everyday life survival strategies of its workers. Since everyday life is the concrete level of reality where conceived, perceived and lived spaces meet, the relationality of labour and space reveals the intensity of oppression in everyday life and the prevailing factors that engender and challenge social reality. The conventional inquiry on workers’ wage, occupation and places of home and work, situate workers into a passive, invisible and insignificant position.

On the other hand, while global capitalism favours the 1% in both the Global North and South and promotes certain lifestyles in which white-collar workers are stuck with their ever-shifting spatial consumption patterns, urban economy still rises on the shoulders of its workers who are contracted, sub-contracted, informally or part-time employed with minimum wage. Within this context, due to the changing mechanisms and dynamics of global capitalism, the discussion of how workers produce the real, material and often neglected spatial fixes through the everyday survival practices becomes crucial.

• How do workers survive, live and pursue life goals? 
  
• How are the everyday survival practices of workers shaping the changing geography of global capitalism? 
  
• How do we inquire the spaces of labour with a wider lense of the working class people’s landscapes? 
  
• What are the spatio-political possibilities of the research on the neglected landscapes of work and everyday life?
  

With the questions stated above, this session will focus on the ways in which workers produce landsies, transport, labour and gender studies with a focus on urban space.