The book provides a critical analysis of the geographies of everyday life, looking at how spatial practices craft w(r)iggle room to cope with the boundaries saturated by normativity, power relations, and inequalities. It explores the possibilities for making do with the everyday practices forming a way of living in cramped spaces. In this respect, early-career researchers and activists share their fieldwork experiences through an intersectional lens based on emerging research methodologies and scholar-activist practices. From their own vantage point, they look at their own contexts, practices, and research subjects at the level of everyday life.
Spatial practices and place-based imaginaries from France, Finland, and Spain to Turkey and South Africa present a wide range of non-counter hegemonic yet enabling practices for transformation in everyday life. The contributors, trained in a variety of convergent disciplines concerned with everyday life and space (geography, geopolitics, architecture, urban planning, sociology, political sciences), discuss scholar-activist methodologies during the current crisis in contemporary academia, reflect on their research methodologies and research experiences, and inquire into the ways of embodied negotiations for agency, survival, and care.
A group of early-career researchers and activists came together to seek out the possibilities of transformative change in everyday life during the peak periods of COVID-19. When researchers and activists were forced to stay at home in isolation, the authors met up online to discuss their subjectivities self-reflexively to challenge the distance between the researcher and 'the field.' The book is the outcome of their collective production based on numerous meetings, writing workshops, and creative debates.
Hande Gülen is a sociologist, Ph.D. candidate, and researcher in geography at the French Institute of Geopolitics (IFG/l'Institut français de géopolitique) at Paris 8 University. She focuses on commons, commoning practices, feminist, and queer studies with an interdisciplinary perspective (geography, sociology, and anthropology) on belongings, emotions, and gender. She holds a sociology, political science and international relations BA degree from Bahçesehir University/ Istanbul and a MA degree in sociology from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University/ Istanbul. She worked as a research assistant in Turkey until being expelled from the university by decree-law, authorized by emergency rule, because of the peace petition. She previously worked as a teaching and research assistant in universities, is involved in research projects focusing on gender, political memories, and human rights defenders, and has taken part in local and international feminist, queer, and scholar-activist networks. &nb p; Ceyda Sungur is a Ph.D. candidate at the geography department of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. She is a researcher engaged to Géographie-Cités research lab. She works on the labour geography of Istanbul and women cleaning workers' agency. Her research contends to tell the story of Istanbul as a site of survival via feminist institutional ethnography by looking at the everyday survival practices of women cleaning workers employed by a multinational service provider. In her bachelor's degree, she trained as an urban planner at the Middle East Technical University. While she was working as a research and teaching assistant at Istanbul Technical University she completed her master thesis on 'Women cleaning workers' everyday life practices and its implications for urban design' at the same university. She is one of the co-directors of Observatoire Urbain d'Istanbul at Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes- Istanbul since November 2022. < iv>Adem Yesilyurt is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at EHESS (Paris, France). His research interests include digital labour, future of work, political economy of media, social movements, and everyday life. He received his MS degree in 2014 from the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at METU (Ankara, Turkey) with his thesis 'The Role of Reporters in Corporate Media: An Inquiry into the Labour Process of Reporters in Turkey.' His doctoral research focuses on the spatiotemporal transformation of work in digital capitalism, particularly in the case of coworking spaces. He has worked as a research assistant at METU between 2011 and 2014 and then at Kocaeli University until he was dismissed by a governmental decree in September 2016 because of the 'peace petition'. He has been a founding member of Kocaeli Academy for Solidarity, and editorial board member of Praksis (quarterly journal of social sciences in Turkish) and Journal of Class& Culture. |
