Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ATGENDER 2023 Conference: Feminist Pedagogy of/beyond Borders, İstanbul, Türkiye, 4 - 06 Eylül 2023, ss.82
This paper has evolved from a prolonged thought and research process, developed in conjunction with a series of seminars and workshops (Spaces in Common, Istanbul, 2016), as well as an edited volume (Commoning the City, Routledge, 2020), which serves as an archive of these events. In one of the workshops, we collaborated with three worker subjects from urban Turkey, a domestic laborer, a sex worker, and a freelance cultural worker, to collectively explore the complex interplay between precarization and commoning. This paper dwells on the insights derived from the accounts of our three research participants to discuss the post-industrial conditions of precarization through affective exploitation, as well as the emergent networks of commoning that challenge these conditions. In these three cases, affects take on multiple meanings and function in multiple ways. When instrumentalized in capitalist circuits, affect emerges not only in labor form but also as a discursive aspect of an exploitative work relationship. Affects are essential to both capitalist production and the reproduction of the unequal work relationship. However, paradoxically, and simultaneously, they provide the excessive capacities for subjects to begin to challenge the conditions of their precarization. We observe how the participants in our study are transformed into post-class political subjects by activating the affirmative potential of affective labor, changing how they perceive themselves and their relationship to others. These observations prompt us, as two women, researchers and higher education workers, to rethink our own (self-)exploitation and the common/comparable aspects of our precarization. The experiences of these three worker subjects have served as more than just case studies for us; they have become pivotal in exploring the possibilities of living labor that capital fails to capture and domesticate. Gaining insight into the cultural codes of solidarity among precarious worker subjects, we have begun to reflect on how to transmit these codes to young researchers and students in the university. In this paper, we would like to share the itinerary of this exploration.